East and West: A Role for Culture in the Acquisition of Nouns and Verbs

How do verb learning and noun learning differ? The consensus in the early word learning literature is that children acquire nouns earlier and more rapidly than verbs (e. 1973). This pattern has been widely interpreted as an indication that verb learning relies on a more sophisticated apprehension of the semantic and syntactic structure of language than does noun learning. Two versions of this argument have been put forth: one is based on a syntactic bootstrapping view of verb learning and focuses primarily on the different linguistic requirements of learning nouns and verbs; the second is based on a natural partitions account of the differences between nouns and verbs and addresses the perceptual and conceptual differences in the concepts labelled by nouns and verbs. Both views make similar predictions about the course of early noun and verb learning., the acquisition of verbs is delayed relative to the acquisition of nouns because nouns (particularly those with concrete, imageable referents) can be acquired through direct observation of the real world contexts in which they are heard. This contextual information is available from the beginning of lexical development; however, it does not provide adequate support for verb learning. Acquiring verbs depends not just on direct observations of the world, but also on the linguistic information that is conveyed through the argument structures in which verbs occur. This linguistic information is not available to young children until they have developed some understanding of the relationship between sentence structure and verb meaning in the particular language they are acquiring. By this East and West 3 account, the delay in verb learning is a logical consequence of relying on argument structure to infer the meaning of a novel verb. Boroditsky, 2001) also predict a delay in the onset of verb learning, but focus on different issues. At stake here is the observation that there is a real world distinction between the concepts labelled by nouns and those labelled by verbs. Relatively speaking, the referents of nouns come in tidy preindividuated packages that are easy to pick out and serve as good candidates for word learning. The relational concepts labelled by verbs are more nebulous and (even for concrete, observable actions) the mapping between verbs and the particular aspects of the world that they encode is highly variable across languages (e.g., in some languages verbs of motion encode manner of motion while others encode path of motion; Papafragou, …