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Nouns before verbs in comprehension vs. production: the view from pragmatics.

B A Goldfield1

  • 1Psychology Dept., Rhode Island College, Providence 02908, USA. bgoldfield@ric.edu

Journal of Child Language
|November 23, 2000
PubMed
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Children learning language produce more nouns than verbs, but parents elicit more verbs. This suggests that language production measures may underestimate children's verb knowledge.

Area of Science:

  • Child language acquisition
  • Developmental psycholinguistics
  • Pragmatics in linguistics

Background:

  • Children learning English tend to produce more nouns than verbs.
  • Parental input and elicitation strategies may influence children's word production.
  • Verb comprehension often exceeds verb production in early development.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate pragmatic factors influencing noun bias in child language production.
  • To examine the relationship between parental elicitation and child word production.
  • To determine if verb comprehension outpaces verb production in toddlers.

Main Methods:

  • Analysis of 44 parent-child dyads from the CHILDES database (New England).
  • Focus on children aged 1 year and 8 months.

Related Experiment Videos

  • Speech act analysis of maternal and child utterances.

    • Main Results:

    • Children produced more nouns than verbs; mothers produced more verbs than nouns.
    • Mothers elicited noun production more frequently than verb production.
    • Mothers prompted actions more than verbs, with verbs often used to elicit actions.
    • Children comprehended significantly more verbs than they produced.

    Conclusions:

    • Parental elicitation strategies favor noun production in young children.
    • Production-based measures may underestimate children's verb vocabulary and understanding.
    • Early lexical development highlights a gap between verb comprehension and production.