Abstract
This study examines pragmatic factors that bias English-speaking
children to produce more of the nouns and fewer of the verbs that they
know. If nouns are favoured for production, parents should elicit more
nouns than verbs in child speech. If verb comprehension is favoured
over verb production, parents should more often prompt children to
produce an action than to produce a verb. Data from 44 parent–child
(age 1;8) dyads in the New England directory of the CHILDES data
base were analysed. Children produced more nouns than verbs but
mothers produced more verbs than nouns. Speech act analyses indicate
that mothers elicited noun production but rarely prompted children to
produce verbs. Mothers more often prompted children to produce an
action than to produce a verb, and verbs occurred most often in maternal
speech acts used to elicit children's actions. Moreover, children comprehended
many more verbs than they produced. These data suggest that
production measures underestimate the frequency and significance of
verb-learning in early lexical development.
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Subject
General Psychology,Linguistics and Language,Developmental and Educational Psychology,Experimental and Cognitive Psychology,Language and Linguistics
Cited by
62 articles.
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