Contrasting lexical biases in bilingual English-Mandarin speech: Verb-biased mothers, but noun-biased toddlers.

Peipei Setoh,Marc H Bornstein,Michelle Cheng,Gianluca Esposito

doi:10.1017/s0305000920000720

Peipei Setoh, Marc H Bornstein + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1017/s0305000920000720

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Abstract

Is noun dominance in early lexical acquisition a widespread or a language-specific phenomenon? Thirty Singaporean bilingual English-Mandarin learning toddlers and their mothers were observed in a mother-child play interaction. For both English and Mandarin, toddlers' speech and reported vocabulary contained more nouns than verbs across book reading and toy playing. In contrast, their mothers' speech contained more verbs than nouns in both English and Mandarin but differed depending on the context of the interaction. Although toddlers demonstrated a noun bias for both languages, the noun bias was more pronounced in English than in Mandarin. Together, these findings support early noun dominance as a widespread phenomenon in the lexical acquisition debate but also provide evidence that language specificity also plays a minor role in children's early lexical development.

Highlights

Examining early lexicalization provides insight as to how the world around us is conceptualized
11,725 utterances produced by mothers (n = 5,868 utterances for the English session, n = 5,857 utterances for the Mandarin session) and 2,206 utterances produced by toddlers were analyzed (n = 1,089 utterances for the English session, n = 1,117 utterances for the Mandarin session)
The current study presents unique findings that contribute to the early noun dominance debate, this study is limited by its methodology

Summary

Introduction

Examining early lexicalization provides insight as to how the world around us is conceptualized. Of particular interest is whether the world is segmented in a preestablished way that allows for natural acquisition of pre-individuated concepts or whether the world is segmented based on a speaker’s linguistic system. The former might be revealed in a widespread bias in early lexicalization (i.e., a widespread noun bias), whereas the latter might be revealed by language-specific biases in early Some researchers support the dominance of nouns in early lexical acquisition (e.g., Au, Dapretto & Song, 1994; Bornstein et al, 2004; Gentner, 1982; Gentner & Boroditsky, 2009; Kauschke, Lee & Pae, 2007; Kim, McGregor & Thompson, 2000; Yamashita, 1997), whereas others support language-specific noun or verb dominance (e.g., Choi, 2000; Choi & Gopnik, 1995; Tardif, 1996; Tardif et al, 1997, 1999, 2008)

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