Culture and Cognition: Lexical and Morphological Processing in Different

Do adults from different cultures use words differently when speaking to their young children? Previous research in early lexical development has provided a positive answer to this question. In particular, work by Choi (2000) and Tardif and colleagues (Tardif, 1996, 2006; Tardif, Shatz, & Naigles, 1997) suggests that the proportion of nouns and verbs in the input to young children differs across cultures. In English, parents use many more nouns than verbs in their speech, whereas in Chinese and Korean, the reverse is true. These authors have found that in the early speech of young Chinese and Korean children, verbs occur more frequently than nouns, reflecting the important role that input plays in early lexical development. In this study, we examined the types of nouns and verbs used by parents and primary caregivers in English, Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish when they talk to children. Our data were based on child-directed speech from the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000). We analyzed the 500 most frequent nouns and verbs that occur in the database for each language, and then compared the frequency of the most frequent words and word categories used by the caregivers. Results indicate both similarities and differences in the type and frequency of words and word categories due to culture. For example, among all cultures, words that refer to food and drink, family members, and animals are among the most frequent ones that parents use in speaking to children. Not incidentally, these are also the words that young children acquire and produce at the earliest stages of vocabulary development. On the other hand, our data also indicate clear differences between cultures. For example, in English, parents talk a lot about rooms, furniture, clothing, weather, and time, whereas these words are not among the most frequent words in Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish cultures, reflecting cultural biases in discussing the world around the child. To further examine the role of input, we focused specifically on comparing parental speech and child speech in the Chinese language. Our analyses revealed that among the 200 most frequent nouns and verbs (types), the ratio of verb to noun is 1:0.77, confirming a slight “verb bias” in Chinese adult input. When we considered the word token frequencies, the verb bias is even stronger. Verbs occurred on the average twice as more frequently as nouns, resulting in a 1:0.48 verb-to-noun ratio. Children’s speech reflects these biases, especially with respect to the frequency of word tokens. These analyses are highly consistent with results from Tardif and colleagues. Table 1 shows the detailed results. Table 1 Types, tokens, and average frequencies of 200 most frequent nouns and verbs in adult and child speech in Chinese. Adult Speech Child Speech Types Tokens Average Freq. Types Tokens Averag