Similarities and variation in noun and verb acquisition: A crosslinguistic study of children learning German, Korean, and Turkish

Abstract

The present study focuses on noun and verb processing during language acquisition, whereby the word production and the word comprehension of preschool children of different ages were investigated across three languages. Two hypotheses were put forward: first, given that languages differ with respect to the clarity of the noun-verb distinction and the saliency of nouns and verbs, crosslinguistic differences in acquisition were expected. Second, in the light of conceptual differences between the basic categories of nouns and verbs, category-specific effects were also expected. Of the children who participated in a naming study, 240 were German, 240 Korean, and 60 Turkish; 233 German and 99 additional German and Korean children were tested with a wordcomprehension task. The target items were 36 nouns and 36 verbs, adapted for the three languages. The results are interpreted as evidence for both languagegeneral tendencies and language-specific influences. Although the children were Correspondence should be addressed to Christina Kauschke, mostly better at processing nouns than verbs, the extent of this discrepancy differed across languages. The results also indicate more crosslinguistic variance in the case of nouns than in the case of verbs. The findings are discussed with respect to structural characteristics of the languages, developmental patterns in lexical acquisition, and characteristics of the task.

Object and Action Naming in Children With Specific Language Impairment

“…Third, similar to previous investigations (Dockrell et al, 2001;Kauschke et al, 2007;Masterson et al, 2008), we used line drawings—which are static representations of actions—to elicit naming responses. This may have contributed to the action naming difficulties.…”

“…To date, only a handful of studies have directly compared object and action naming in children (Davidoff & Masterson, 1996; Kauschke et al, 2007; Masterson et al, 2008; Schelletter, 2005). These studies included children who spoke English, German, Turkish, and Korean.…”

“…Studies have shown that children learn nouns more quickly than they do verbs (Bornstein et al, 2004; Childers & Tomasello, 2002; Gentner, 2006; Imai et al, 2008; Seston, Golinkoff, Ma, & Hirsh-Pasek, 2009), and adults (Szekely et al, 2005) and children (Davidoff & Masterson, 1996; Kauschke, Lee, & Pae, 2007;Masterson,Druks,&Gallienne, 2008; Schelletter, 2005) demonstrate a reliable noun advantage on naming tasks. If verbs invoke high processing demands (Tomasello & Kruger, 1992), it follows that children with specific language impairment (SLI), a population that demonstrates limited processing capacities (see, e.g., Ellis Weismer & Evans, 2002; Montgomery, 2002; Windsor, 2002), might present with exaggerated noun–verb gaps.…”

Lexical retrieval for nouns and verbs in typically developing bilectal children

“…The presence of a (Kauschke et al, 2007), and English-speaking children (Davidoff & Masterson, 1996;Kauschke & Stan, 2004), particularly toddlers (Masterson et al, 2008). This finding of a significant effect of word class across languages suggests that naming action pictures is inherently more difficult than naming object pictures for typically developing children between 3 and 7 years of age cross-linguistically.…”

Nomen est omen: Investigating the dominance of nouns in word comprehension with eye movement analyses

“…Further results of this study indicate, however, that children understand verbs better than producing them actively in speech. Nouns seem to be preferred to verbs in speech production (Goldfield, 2000), their acquisition seems easier (Imai et al, 2005; Kauschke, Lee, & Pae, 2007), and moreover they are remembered more easily (Mohr, 1992). …”