An Image Is Worth a Thousand Words: Why Nouns Tend to Dominate Verbs in Early Word Learning.
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TLDR
One hypothesis about the difference between noun and verb acquisition is examined, suggesting the advantage nouns have is not a function of grammatical form class but rather related to a word's imageability.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.read more
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Twenty-Five Years Using the Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm to Study Language Acquisition: What Have We Learned?
TL;DR: The intermodal preferential looking paradigm (IPLP) enables the exploration of the underlying mechanisms involved in language learning and illuminates how infants identify the correspondences between language and referents in the world.
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Are Nouns Learned Before Verbs? Infants Provide Insight Into a Long-Standing Debate
Sandra R. Waxman,Xiaolan Fu,Sudha Arunachalam,Erin M. Leddon,Kathleen Geraghty,Hyun Joo Song +5 more
TL;DR: New cross-linguistic evidence from infants is summarized that underscores the role of universal features and begins to clarify the impact of distinctly different languages on early language and conceptual development.
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2.5-year-olds use cross-situational consistency to learn verbs under referential uncertainty
Rose M. Scott,Cynthia Fisher +1 more
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Imageability predicts the age of acquisition of verbs in Chinese children.
TL;DR: Whereas early Chinese and English nouns do not differ in imageability, verbs receive higher imageability ratings in Chinese than in English, and imageability independently accounts for a portion of the variance in age of acquisition (AoA) of verb learning in Chinese andEnglish.
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Teaching for breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge: learning from explicit and implicit instruction and the storybook texts
David K. Dickinson,Kimberly Turner Nesbitt,Molly F. Collins,Elizabeth Burke Hadley,Katherine Mackay Newman,Bretta L. Rivera,Hande Ilgez,Ageliki Nicolopoulou,Roberta Michnick Golinkoff,Kathy Hirsh-Pasek +9 more
TL;DR: This paper reported results from two studies conducted to examine word learning among preschool children in group book reading while they developed a scalable method of teaching words during book reading and found that children with stronger vocabulary more quickly acquired initial representations from exposure alone and deeper knowledge when they received intentional instruction.
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