An image is worth a thousand words: why nouns tend to dominate verbs in early word learning

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 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...

Quantifying Iconicity’s Contribution during Language Acquisition: Implications for Vocabulary Learning

“…Several studies have shown that words that are higher in imageability and concreteness tend to be learned earlier in acquisition (Gillette et al, 1999). McDonough et al (2011) found that imageability accounted for about 10% of the variance, after syntactic category (noun or verb) and frequency were partialed out. Their sample was limited to just 120 words that had imageability ratings, however.…”

Norwegian Words: A lexical database for clinicians and researchers

“…Furthermore, several studies have reported imageability to facilitate word learning (Ma, Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek, McDonough, & Tardif, 2009;McDonough, Song, Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, & Lannon, 2011;Tardif, 1996Tardif, , 2006. Imageability data have been collected for varying numbers of words in several languages, including English (Bird, Franklin, & Howard, 2001;Paivio et al, 1968;Stadthagen-Gonzalez & Davis, 2006), Chinese (Ma et al, 2009), French (Desrochers & Thompson, 2009), Italian (Della Rosa, Catricalà, Vigliocco, & Cappa, 2010) and Japanese (Nishimoto, Ueda, Miyawaki, Une, & Takahashi, 2012).…”

“…For the 458 items that are common to Norwegian Words and the Norwegian CDI vocabulary checklist, Hansen (in progress) has calculated a CDI-based AoA for each word, defined as the first age in months when at least half of the children in the sample are reported by their parents to produce it (Goodman et al, 2008;Ma et al, 2009;McDonough et al, 2011). Sixteen of the words do not reach the 50% limit by 36 months; all of which have a subjective AoA of 4;6 or more.…”

Cross-cultural evidence for multimodal motherese: Asian Indian mothers’ adaptive use of synchronous words and gestures

“…This in turn should yield corresponding variations in maternal use of multimodal motherese to highlight noun-object versus verb-action relations to infants, especially because it scaffolds infants’ attention to word-referent relations. Given that referents for verbs are far more fleeting and intangible than referents for nouns (Gentner, 1982; McDonough, Song, Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, et al, 2011), Indian mothers might use more scaffolding when speaking a verb-dominant Indian language than noun-dominant English.…”