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 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 in word learning.Nouns tend to appear before verbs (Gentner, 1982) and to dominate English-speaking children's early lexicons (e.g., Fenson et al., 1994;Goldin-Meadow, Seligman, & Gelman, 1976). This finding has been replicated across the globe, with languages like German, Mandarin, Kaluli, Japanese, Turkish (Gentner, 1982), Spanish (Jackson-Maldonado, Thal, Marchman, Bates, & Gutierrez-Clellen, 1993), Italian (Caselli et al., 1995), French (Bassano, 2000;Parisse & Le Normand, 2000;Poulin-Dubois, Graham, & Sippola, 1995) and others (Bornstein, 2005;Bornstein et al., 2004; but see Tardif, Wellman, Fung, Liu, & Fang, 2005). Even in the laboratory, novel nouns are learned more quickly and easily than novel verbs (e.g., Childers & Tomasello, 2002;Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek, Bailey, & Wenger, 1992;Golinkoff, Jacquet, Hirsh-Pasek, & Nandakumar, 1996), a result also found in Japanese where verbs often appear in privileged, sentence-final positions (Imai, Haryu, & Okada, 2005) and in Chinese where verbs can appear in isolation Imai et al., 2008).Explanations for the preponderance of nouns in early vocabularies come in three forms. First, Kersten and Smith (2002) and Echols and Marti (2004) suggest an attentional explanation: Children preferentially attend to objects and prefer to map new names to objects rather than to the actions in which the objects are engaged. Only when children know the names of the objects will they go on to learn the names of the actions. Second, the disparity is based in perception: While objects are often stable in time and space, actions are fleeting and dynamic and unfold in time and space. Extracting a categorical representation (or the "verbal essence," Golinkoff et al., 2002) is more difficult than perceiving the object categories that nouns label (see also . Learning the name of an action requires that children perceptually abstract the invariants of the action (e.g., running) across multiple exemplars that show wide variation. For example, a toddler, Grandpa, and a dog all run, but do so in very different ways (Golinkoff et al., 2002). A final explanation h...

Verbs are harder to learn than nouns in English and in many other languages, but are relatively easy to learn in Chinese. This paper evaluates one potential explanation for these findings by examining the construct of imageability, or the ability of a word to produce a mental image. Chinese adults rated the imageability of Chinese words from the Chinese Communicative Development Inventory (Tardif et al., in press). Imageability ratings were a reliable predictor of age of acquisition in Chinese for both nouns and verbs. Furthermore, whereas early Chinese and English nouns do NOT differ in imageability, verbs receive higher imageability ratings in Chinese than in English. Compared with input frequency, imageability independently accounts for a portion of the variance in age of acquisition (AoA) of verb learning in Chinese and English.

Four experiments investigated infants' preferences for age‐appropriate and age‐inappropriate infant‐directed speech (IDS) over adult‐directed speech (ADS). Two initial experiments showed that 6‐, 10‐, and 14‐month‐olds preferred IDS directed toward younger infants, and 4‐, 8‐, 10‐, and 14‐month‐olds, but not 6‐month‐olds, preferred IDS directed toward older infants. In Experiment 3. 6‐month‐olds preferred IDS directed toward older infants when the frequency of repeated utterances matched IDS to younger infants. In Experiment 4, 6‐month‐olds preferred repeated IDS utterances over the same IDS utterances organized without repetition. Attention to repeated utterances precedes word segmentation and sensitivity to statistical cues in continuous speech, and might play a role in the discovery of these and other aspects of linguistic structure.

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Immigration and globalization have dramatically changed the ethnic landscape of the United States, yet stereotypes about race continue to exist. Foreign language classrooms are at the heart of teaching about diversity. We investigated whether undergraduates (with varying exposure to Spanish language education) could accurately identify the race of Hispanic people depicted in photographs. The amount of Spanish courses was unrelated to participants’ accuracy; however, the number of courses was inversely related to confidence. The findings from this exploratory study suggest that the more Spanish language education one has, the more one realizes that appearances can be deceiving; as a result, individuals may be less likely to adhere to societally conditioned stereotypes of specific groups of people. At a time when foreign language programs are at risk of being eliminated from colleges and universities, these findings should serve as a message to educators and administrators alike about the importance of foreign language education.