Cross-Cultural Differences in the Input to Early Word Learning

Young English learners typically have vocabularies dominated by nouns, while their Mandarin learning counterparts have relatively more verbs. Novice language learners must initially learn words from the situational contexts in which they appear, since they have limited access to syntactic or semantic context. These studies explore whether differences in these situational contexts could account for the differences in early vocabulary composition. We assessed the potency of this word-to-world mapping procedure in each language by asking adults to identify nouns and verbs from their extralinguistic contexts in maternal speech. The full pattern is examined in English native speakers given either English or Mandarin input (Exp. 1) and Mandarin native speakers given English or Mandarin input (Exp. 2). Results indicate that adults identify more nouns than verbs in English input, but identify as many verbs as nouns in Mandarin input. Thus cross-linguistic differences in the information that is available in extralingistic contexts may account for some of the differences in early vocabulary composition.