title: Language-specific noun bias: evidence from bilingual children.
abstract: Most evidence concerning cross-linguistic variation in noun bias, the preponderance of nouns in early expressive lexicons (Gentner, 1982), has come from comparisons of monolingual children acquiring different languages. Such designs are susceptible to a number of potential confounders, including group differences in developmental level and sociodemographic characteristics. The aim of this study was to quantify noun bias in bilingual Mandarin-English toddlers whose expressive lexicons in each language contained 50-300 words. Parents of fifty children (1;10-2;6) reported separately on their English and Mandarin expressive lexicons. The mean percentage of Mandarin nouns (38%) was significantly lower than the percentage of English nouns (54%) and was robust to analyses of twelve potential covariates. Analyses of the most frequently reported words suggested that lexical reduplication could be considered as a potential influence on vocabulary composition in future studies. Results suggest that characteristics of the input significantly shape early lexicons.
authors.affiliation: University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.
authors.forename: Lei
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Xuan
authors.forename: Christine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Dollaghan
mesh_terms: D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D019303:Multilingualism; D014825:Vocabulary