Extra-linguistic modulation of the English noun-bias: evidence from Malaysian bilingual infants and toddlers

Early vocabularies typically contain more nouns than verbs. Yet, the strength of this noun-bias varies across languages and cultures. Two main theories have aimed at explaining such variations; either that relative importance vs. verbs is specific to language itself, or extra-linguistic factors shape early vocabulary structures. To address debate, present study compares distribution within same language—English—between Malay–English Mandarin–English bilingual infants toddlers. The English receptive lexicons children contained those bilinguals, suggesting modulated by external English. We discuss potential role socio-cultural differences on composition vocabularies.