Are Nouns Learned Before Verbs? Infants Provide Insight Into a Long‐Standing Debate

Abstract

For decades, a spirited debate has existed over whether infants’ remarkable capacity to learn words is shaped primarily by universal features of human language or by specific featuers of the particulare native language they are acquiring. A strong focus for this debate has been a well-documented difference in early word learning: Infants’ success in learning verbs lags behind their success in learning nouns.. In this review, we articulate both sides of the debate and summarize new cross-linguistic evidence from infants that underscores the role of universal features and begins to clarify the impact of distinctly different languages on early language and conceptual development.

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

“…These findings support the broader framework that multiple sources of information are influential in language processing (Massaro, 1987(Massaro, , 1998Movellan and McClelland, 2001) and language learning (Hirsh-Pasek et al, 2000), as well as word learning in particular (Goodman et al, 2008;Waxman et al, 2013;Massaro and Rowe, 2015;Hsu et al, 2017). For example, Hirsh-Pasek et al 's Emergentist Coalition Model describes how children rely on multiple cues over development in the mapping of words onto referents, with the use of and the weight given to these cues changing across development.…”

“…For example, Waxman et al (2013) demonstrate an important role of non-iconic universal features on early language acquisition and conceptual development across different languages. A child's ability to learn the meaning of a novel verb is influenced by the particular language they are acquiring and the linguistic contexts in which the verb occurs (Roy et al, 2015).…”

Children's acquisition of nouns and verbs in Italian: contrasting the roles of frequency and positional salience in maternal language

“…There are many possible reasons for why noun learning may generally outstrip verb learning (see Bornstein et al, 2004; Gentner & Boroditsky, 2001, 2009; Waxman, Fu, Arunachalam, Leddon, Geraghty & Song, 2013, for reviews). In the present study, we focused on two prominent input factors that are thought to influence children’s acquisition of nouns and verbs: frequency and positional salience.…”

Carving the World for Language: How Neuroscientific Research Can Enrich the Study of First and Second Language Learning

“…Verbs, in particular, are the glue that connect predicates like kicked to arguments like man and ball . Yet, these “hard words” (Gleitman, Cassidy, Papafragou, Nappa, & Trueswell, 2005) are notoriously difficult to learn, even for first language learners in so-called “verb-friendly” languages, which allow a verb to be presented alone or in the salient final position in a sentence (Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, 2006; Imai et al, 2008; Waxman et al, 2013). Relational terms present unique challenges, demanding that we map a discrete representational system (e.g., a verb) onto a continuous and dynamic representation of events that unfolds through space and time (Hespos, Grossman, & Saylor, 2010).…”