title: An image is worth a thousand words: why nouns tend to dominate verbs in early word learning.
abstract: Nouns are generally easier to learn than verbs (e.g., Bornstein, 2005; Bornstein et al., 2004; Gentner, 1982; Maguire, Hirsh-Pasek, & Golinkoff, 2006). Yet, verbs appear in children's earliest vocabularies, creating a seeming paradox. This paper examines one hypothesis about the difference between noun and verb acquisition. Perhaps the advantage nouns have is not a function of grammatical form class but rather related to a word's imageability. Here, word imageability ratings and form class (nouns and verbs) were correlated with age of acquisition according to the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) (Fenson et al., 1994). CDI age of acquisition was negatively correlated with words' imageability ratings. Further, a word's imageability contributes to the variance of the word's age of acquisition above and beyond form class, suggesting that at the beginning of word learning, imageability might be a driving factor.
authors.affiliation: Neumann University, Aston, PA 19014, USA. mcdonouc@neumann.edu
authors.forename: Colleen
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: McDonough
authors.forename: Lulu
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Song
authors.forename: Kathy
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Hirsh-Pasek
authors.forename: Roberta Michnick
authors.initials: RM
authors.lastname: Golinkoff
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Lannon
mesh_terms: D002675:Child, Preschool; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007804:Language Development; D007858:Learning; D008037:Linguistics; D010290:Parents; D014825:Vocabulary