Contrasting lexical biases in bilingual English–Mandarin speech : verb-biased mothers, but noun-biased toddlers
Is noun dominance in early lexical acquisition a widespread or a language-specific phenomenon? Thirty Singaporean bilingual English–Mandarin learning toddlers and their mothers were observed in a mother-child play interaction. For both English and Mandarin, toddlers’ speech and reported vocabulary c...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Drugi avtorji: | |
| Format: | Journal Article |
| Jezik: | English |
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2021
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| Teme: | |
| Online dostop: | https://hdl.handle.net/10356/146434 |
| _version_ | 1826123781406457856 |
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| author | Setoh, Peipei Cheng, Michelle Bornstein, Marc H. Esposito, Gianluca |
| author2 | School of Social Sciences |
| author_facet | School of Social Sciences Setoh, Peipei Cheng, Michelle Bornstein, Marc H. Esposito, Gianluca |
| author_sort | Setoh, Peipei |
| collection | NTU |
| description | Is noun dominance in early lexical acquisition a widespread or a language-specific phenomenon? Thirty Singaporean bilingual English–Mandarin learning toddlers and their mothers were observed in a mother-child play interaction. For both English and Mandarin, toddlers’ speech and reported vocabulary contained more nouns than verbs across book reading and toy playing. In contrast, their mothers’ speech contained more verbs than nouns in both English and Mandarin but differed depending on the context of the interaction. Although toddlers demonstrated a noun bias for both languages, the noun bias was more pronounced in English than in Mandarin. Together, these findings support early noun dominance as a widespread phenomenon in the lexical acquisition debate but also provide evidence that language specificity also plays a minor role in children’s early lexical development. |
| first_indexed | 2024-10-01T06:09:56Z |
| format | Journal Article |
| id | ntu-10356/146434 |
| institution | Nanyang Technological University |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-10-01T06:09:56Z |
| publishDate | 2021 |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | ntu-10356/1464342023-03-05T15:33:13Z Contrasting lexical biases in bilingual English–Mandarin speech : verb-biased mothers, but noun-biased toddlers Setoh, Peipei Cheng, Michelle Bornstein, Marc H. Esposito, Gianluca School of Social Sciences Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine (LKCMedicine) Social sciences::Psychology Bilingualism Noun Bias Is noun dominance in early lexical acquisition a widespread or a language-specific phenomenon? Thirty Singaporean bilingual English–Mandarin learning toddlers and their mothers were observed in a mother-child play interaction. For both English and Mandarin, toddlers’ speech and reported vocabulary contained more nouns than verbs across book reading and toy playing. In contrast, their mothers’ speech contained more verbs than nouns in both English and Mandarin but differed depending on the context of the interaction. Although toddlers demonstrated a noun bias for both languages, the noun bias was more pronounced in English than in Mandarin. Together, these findings support early noun dominance as a widespread phenomenon in the lexical acquisition debate but also provide evidence that language specificity also plays a minor role in children’s early lexical development. Ministry of Education (MOE) Published version This research was supported by Singapore Ministry of Education’s Academic Research Fund Tier 1 and Social Science Research Thematic Grant (MOE2016-SSRTG-017) to Peipei Setoh. 2021-02-17T01:45:24Z 2021-02-17T01:45:24Z 2021 Journal Article Setoh, P., Cheng, M., Bornstein, M. H., & Esposito, G. (2021). Contrasting lexical biases in bilingual English–Mandarin speech : verb-biased mothers, but noun-biased toddlers. Journal of Child Language, 1–24. doi:10.1017/S0305000920000720 1469-7602 https://hdl.handle.net/10356/146434 10.1017/S0305000920000720 1 24 en Journal of Child Language © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited. application/pdf |
| spellingShingle | Social sciences::Psychology Bilingualism Noun Bias Setoh, Peipei Cheng, Michelle Bornstein, Marc H. Esposito, Gianluca Contrasting lexical biases in bilingual English–Mandarin speech : verb-biased mothers, but noun-biased toddlers |
| title | Contrasting lexical biases in bilingual English–Mandarin speech : verb-biased mothers, but noun-biased toddlers |
| title_full | Contrasting lexical biases in bilingual English–Mandarin speech : verb-biased mothers, but noun-biased toddlers |
| title_fullStr | Contrasting lexical biases in bilingual English–Mandarin speech : verb-biased mothers, but noun-biased toddlers |
| title_full_unstemmed | Contrasting lexical biases in bilingual English–Mandarin speech : verb-biased mothers, but noun-biased toddlers |
| title_short | Contrasting lexical biases in bilingual English–Mandarin speech : verb-biased mothers, but noun-biased toddlers |
| title_sort | contrasting lexical biases in bilingual english mandarin speech verb biased mothers but noun biased toddlers |
| topic | Social sciences::Psychology Bilingualism Noun Bias |
| url | https://hdl.handle.net/10356/146434 |
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