Nouns are not always learned before verbs: Evidence from mandarin speakers' early vocabularies

This article examines D. Gentner's (1982) claim that nouns are universally predominant in children's early vocabularies. When a conservative method of counting nouns was used, 9 out of 10 22-month-old monolingual Mandarin-speaking children produced more verbs or action words than nouns or object labels in their naturalistic speech. When a more liberal definition of nouns was used, neither a noun nor a verb bias was found. Importantly: there was no difference in the type-token ratios of the children's use of nouns and verbs. Thus, a sampling bias type of explanation cannot explain the prevalence of verbs in these data. Instead, these data suggest the importance of a variety of linguistic and sociocultural input factors in early word learning.