Nouns are not always learned before verbs: Evidence from Mandarin speakers' early vocabularies.

Abstract

This article examines D. Gentner's (1982) claim that nouns are universally predominant in children's early vocabularies. When a conservative method of counting nouns was used, 9 out of 10 22-month-old monolingual Mandarin-speaking children produced more verbs or action words than nouns or object labels in their naturalistic speech. When a more liberal definition of nouns was used, neither a noun nor a verb bias was found. Importantly, there was no difference in the type-token ratios of the children's use of nouns and verbs. Thus, a sampling bias type of explanation cannot explain the prevalence of verbs in these data. Instead, these data suggest the importance of variety of linguistic and sociocultural input factors in early word learning.