Object and action picture naming in three- and five-year-old children

The objectives were to explore the often reported noun advantage in children's language acquisition using a picture naming paradigm and to explore the variables that affect picture naming performance. Participants in Experiment 1 were aged three and five years, and in Experiment 2, five years. The stimuli were action and object pictures. In Experiment 1, action pictures produced more errors than object pictures for the three-year-olds, but not the five-year-olds. A qualitative analysis of the errors revealed a somewhat different pattern of errors across age groups. In Experiment 2 there was no robust difference in accuracy for the actions and objects but naming times were longer for actions. Across both experiments, imageability was a robust predictor of object naming performance, while spoken frequency was the most important predictor of action naming. The results are discussed in terms of possible differences in the manner in which nouns and verbs are acquired.