The development of picture naming: Differences between verbs and nouns

Abstract

The development of picture naming was assessed in a cross-sectional study of 316 children in five age bands from 3;0–3;5 years to 5;0–5;5 years. The study examined naming accuracy for pictures depicting two types of actions (verbs) and nouns. Previous analyses suggested that verbs are different from nouns because of the inherent complexity of the lexical representations for verbs. Consequently, it has been argued that verb labels should be acquired later than noun labels. However, a review of research in both psycholinguistics and neuropsychology allowed us to predict that young children would not necessarily have more difficulty naming pictures of verbs than pictures of nouns. Our study confirmed that, at all age bands tested, only depictions of intransitive verbs produced more errors than those for nouns. A second study using video clips replicated the findings of the first study and ruled out the possibility that children's difficulty with intransitive verbs was due to difficulties in picture interpretation. We suggest that the results reflect the different underlying lexical representations for transitive and intransitive verbs.