title: Nouns and verbs in Chintang: children's usage and surrounding adult speech.
abstract: Analyzing the development of the noun-to-verb ratio in a longitudinal corpus of four Chintang (Sino-Tibetan) children, we find that up to about age four, children have a significantly higher ratio than adults. Previous cross-linguistic research rules out an explanation of this in terms of a universal noun bias; instead, a likely cause is that Chintang verb morphology is polysynthetic and difficult to learn. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that the development of Chintang children's noun-to-verb ratio correlates significantly with the extent to which they show a similar flexibility with verbal morphology to that of the surrounding adults, as measured by morphological paradigm entropy. While this development levels off around age three, children continue to have a higher overall noun-to-verb ratio than adults. A likely explanation lies in the kinds of activities that children are engaged in and that are almost completely separate from adults' activities in this culture.
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig.
authors.forename: Sabine
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Stoll
authors.forename: Balthasar
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Bickel
authors.forename: Elena
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Lieven
authors.forename: Netra P
authors.initials: NP
authors.lastname: Paudyal
authors.forename: Goma
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Banjade
authors.forename: Toya N
authors.initials: TN
authors.lastname: Bhatta
authors.forename: Martin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Gaenszle
authors.forename: Judith
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Pettigrew
authors.forename: Ichchha Purna
authors.initials: IP
authors.lastname: Rai
authors.forename: Manoj
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Rai
authors.forename: Novel Kishore
authors.initials: NK
authors.lastname: Rai
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D002681:China; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D012660:Semantics; D014825:Vocabulary