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Early lexical development in English- and Korean-speaking children: language-general and language-specific patterns

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2000

MIKYONG KIM ,
KARLA K. McGREGOR  and
CYNTHIA K. THOMPSON
MIKYONG KIM
Affiliation:
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois
KARLA K. McGREGOR
Affiliation:
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois
CYNTHIA K. THOMPSON
Affiliation:
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois
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Abstract

The present study examined the composition of the early productive vocabulary of eight Korean- and eight English-learning children and the morpho-syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic characteristics of their caregivers' input in order to determine parallels between caregiver input and early lexical development. Vocabulary acquisition was followed using maternal diary and checklists for the Korean-learning children (from a mean age of 1;6 to 1;9) and for the English-learning children (from a mean age of 1;4 to 1;8). Results showed that both Korean- learning and English-learning children acquired significantly more nouns than verbs at the 50-word mark. However, Korean children learned significantly more verbs than did English-learning children. The relative ease with which Korean learners, as compared to English learners, acquired verbs parallels several differences in the linguistic and socio-pragmatic characteristics of the input addressed to them. Korean- speaking caregivers presented more activity-oriented utterances, more verbs, and more salient cues to verbs than did English-speaking caregivers. These data suggest that both general and language-specific factors shape the early lexicon.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , June 2000 , pp. 225 - 254
Copyright
© 2000 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The authors thank Dedre Gentner and two anonymous reviewers for making valuable comments on an early draft of the manuscript. Christine Brennan and Hyunjue Oh transcribed and coded the language samples for reliability. We extend special thanks to all children and caregivers who participated in this study.