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An image is worth a thousand words: why nouns tend to dominate verbs in early word learning
Author(s) -
McDonough Colleen,
Song Lulu,
HirshPasek Kathy,
Golinkoff Roberta Michnick,
Lan Robert
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
developmental science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.801
H-Index - 127
eISSN - 1467-7687
pISSN - 1363-755X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2010.00968.x
Subject(s) - noun , psychology , age of acquisition , verb , bates , linguistics , language acquisition , word (group theory) , class (philosophy) , part of speech , vocabulary , vocabulary development , cognitive psychology , cognition , artificial intelligence , computer science , philosophy , mathematics education , neuroscience , engineering , aerospace engineering
Abstract Nouns are generally easier to learn than verbs (e.g. Bornstein, 2005; Bornstein et al., 2004; Gentner, 1982; Maguire, Hirsh‐Pasek & Golinkoff, 2006). Yet, verbs appear in children’s earliest vocabularies, creating a seeming paradox. This paper examines one hypothesis about the difference between noun and verb acquisition. Perhaps the advantage nouns have is not a function of grammatical form class but rather is related to a word’s imageability. Here, word imageability ratings and form class (nouns and verbs) were correlated with age of acquisition according to the MacArthur‐Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI; Fenson et al., 1994). CDI age of acquisition was negatively correlated with words’ imageability ratings. Further, a word’s imageability contributes to the variance of the word’s age of acquisition above and beyond form class, suggesting that at the beginning of word learning, imageability might be a driving factor.