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Do early noun and verb production predict later verb and noun production? Theoretical implications

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 February 2016

EMIDDIA LONGOBARDI ,
PIETRO SPATARO ,
DIANE L. PUTNICK  and
MARC H. BORNSTEIN
EMIDDIA LONGOBARDI*
Affiliation:
Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology, University Sapienza of Rome, Italy
PIETRO SPATARO
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University Sapienza of Rome, Italy
DIANE L. PUTNICK
Affiliation:
Child and Family Research, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA
MARC H. BORNSTEIN
Affiliation:
Child and Family Research, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA
*
[*] Address for correspondence: Emiddia Longobardi, Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology, University Sapienza of Rome (Italy), Via dei Marsi 78, 00185 (Rome). tel: +39 06 49917908; fax: +39 06 49917910; e-mail: emiddia.longobardi@uniroma1.it
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Abstract

Many studies have addressed the question of the relative dominance of nouns over verbs in the productive vocabularies of children in the second year of life. Surprisingly, cross-class (noun-to-verb and verb-to-noun) relations between these two lexical categories have seldom been investigated. The present longitudinal study employed observational and parent-report data obtained from thirty mother–child dyads at 1;4, 1;8, and 2;0 to examine this issue. Both the Natural Partitions/Relational Relativity (NP/RR) hypothesis and the Emergentist Coalition Model (ECM) predict that having an initial repertoire of common nouns should facilitate the acquisition of novel verbs, whereas only the ECM suggests that children exploit the syntactic and semantic constraints of known verbs to infer the meaning of novel nouns. In line with the ECM, hierarchical regression analyses indicated that the percentages of nouns produced by children at 1;4 predicted later verbs at 1;8, whereas the percentages of verbs produced at 1;8 predicted later nouns at 2;0.

Type
Brief Research Report
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , March 2017 , pp. 480 - 495
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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