Early lexical composition of Turkish-Dutch bilinguals: Nouns before verbs or verbs before nouns

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Nouns and verbs are considered as fundamental categories of lexical development, and there are contradicting views on the order of the acquisition. One view claims that nouns are acquired earlier than verbs and this primacy of nouns can be attributed to perceptual-conceptual constraints from a linguistic point of view, on the other hand, nouns and verbs are the lexical units which categorically highlight language-general and language-specific characteristics. These language-specific characteristics have motivated this research because of the different typological characteristics between Turkish and Dutch in terms of nouns and verbs. The aim of this study is two-fold: to investigate the Dutch and Turkish lexicon of Turkish-Dutch bilingual children with respect to noun-verb categories and to consider the role of gender. Our sample comprised 55 Turkish-Dutch bilingual children aged between 9 and 36 months. We found that age, language and gender are at play during early lexical development. Vocabulary develops after 12 months and nouns are prioritized over verbs both in comprehension and production.</jats:p>

The Role of Input Factors in the Lexical Development of European Portuguese as a Heritage Language in Portuguese–German Bilingual Speakers

“…However, despite the differences between the experimental and the control group concerning their total production of nouns and verbs, the within-group statistical analyses revealed that the lexical repertoires of both groups of EP speakers presented identical patterns of lexical distribution with respect to the proportion of lexical items belonging to the three grammatical categories under analysis; that is, both groups produced significantly more nouns than verbs and more verbs than adjectives in the experimental task. This finding is consistent with the results of previous research conducted with bilingual and monolingual children from different language communities [4,5,14,29,50,56,60], according to which the lexical repertoires of the investigated children are predominantly composed of nouns. Our results further suggest that, with respect to lexical composition, the "noun bias" observed in the early lexicons of monolingual and bilingual children from diverse language populations continues in subsequent stages of language development in EP-speaking children.…”

“…Following this line of investigation, research on bilingual children's lexical development has attempted to determine whether their early vocabularies present the same patterns of lexical composition as those of their monolingual counterparts, with several studies showing a large proportion of nouns in early bilingual lexicons of different language pairs [4,5,14,29,[67][68][69][70]. David and Li [5], for instance, found that the productive lexicons of 13 French-English bilingual children (12-36-month-olds) comprise, in each language, a higher proportion of nouns in comparison to lexical items belonging to the other grammatical categories.…”

“…Empirical research has also found that, similar to monolingual lexical acquisition, there is also an asymmetry between the receptive and the productive lexical competence in bilingual children's lexical development. In fact, several studies conducted with children with different language pairs have provided evidence that their receptive lexical repertoires are consistently larger than their productive ones [6,9,[27][28][29][30].…”

Contrasting lexical biases in bilingual English–Mandarin speech: Verb-biased mothers, but noun-biased toddlers

“…For all four studies, bilingual children were learning one noun-privileged language (English, Dutch) and one verb-privileged language (Mandarin, Turkish, Filipino). Three of the studies found that children's vocabularies (English-Mandarin and Dutch-Turkish) for both noun-privileged and verb-privileged languages were dominated by nouns (Levey & Cruz, 2003;Özcan et al, 2016;Xuan & Dollaghan, 2013). The remaining study, however, found that bilingual English-Filipino preschoolers' English vocabulary was noun dominated, but their Filipino vocabulary was not lexically biased (Lucas & Bernardo, 2008).…”

“…Early noun dominance in bilinguals: A widespread or language-specific phenomenon? To our knowledge, only four studies have investigated lexical biases in bilingual children simultaneously learning a noun-privileged language and a verb-privileged language (Levey & Cruz, 2003;Lucas & Bernardo, 2008;Özcan, Altinkamiş & Gillis, 2016;Xuan & Dollaghan, 2013). For all four studies, bilingual children were learning one noun-privileged language (English, Dutch) and one verb-privileged language (Mandarin, Turkish, Filipino).…”