Why Nouns Trump Verbs in Word Learning: New Evidence from Children and Adults in the Human Simulation Paradigm

Abstract

Despite tremendous cross-linguistic and cross-cultural variation in linguistic input, early vocabularies are dominated by nouns. One explanation for this pattern appeals to the conceptual capacity of the learner—nouns predominate because the concepts to which they refer are somehow simpler or more accessible to young learners than the concepts to which verbs refer. Evidence for this viewpoint has come primarily from infants and toddlers. Another explanation appeals to the linguistic requirements underlying word learning—nouns predominate because their acquisition is well-supported by observation, while verbs often depend on additional linguistic information which early word learners are not yet able to utilize. Evidence for this viewpoint has thus far come primarily from adults in the Human Simulation Paradigm (HSP). To bridge this gap, we modified the HSP task to accommodate children. Although children's approach to this task differed markedly from that of adults, their patterns of performance were strikingly similar. Given observation alone, 7-year-olds—like adults—identified nouns more successfully than verbs. When observation was supplemented with linguistic information, 7-year-olds successfully recruited this information to identify verbs. This outcome represents the first empirical demonstration that young children's noun advantage may be attributable, at least in part, to the distinct linguistic requirements underlying the acquisition of nouns and verbs.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research was supported by National Institutes of Health grant #HD030410. Portions of this work were presented at the biennial meeting of the Cognitive Development Society in October of 2005 in San Diego, California, and at the annual meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association in May of 2006 in Chicago, Illinois. We thank Pamela Blewitt, Rebecca Brand, Cynthia Fisher, Susan Hespos, Jeffrey Lidz, and especially Jesse Snedeker for being so smart and for giving us such thoughtful comments on previous drafts of this paper. We are grateful to Jennie Woodring, Leonie Deutsch, and Irena Braun for their help with scheduling participants. We thank Morgan Rowe, Bridget O'Brien, and Adriana Weisleder for help in the lab, and we are indebted to the children, parents, teachers, and staff of the Walt Disney Magnet School in Chicago.

Notes

¹Although several of our target words could, in principle, be interpreted as either nouns or verbs (e.g., book, head, nose, picture, love, play, talk, and want), each word has one interpretation that predominates in children's speech and in child-directed speech. For example, children are unlikely to hear book used as a verb or to use talk as a noun. In fact, it was always obvious to our coders from the context whether a child was producing a noun or a verb.