Abstract:
In many languages, young children rst learn more nouns than verbs, although this appears not
to be universal: Mandarin-speaking children show a verb bias (Dhillon, 2010). The Peabody Picture
Vocabulary Test (PPVT) and the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (MCDI)
have been widely used to assess receptive vocabulary. The question is whether these tests are also viable
for measuring learning at the level of grammatical class in order to diagnose the presence of a noun bias
(vs. verbs). In this exploratory study, an attempt is made to answer this question by investigating the
composition of these tests, by means of simulations with biased children and by exploring the development
of the noun bias in young children. In addition, the English and Spanish versions are compared against
each other and a simple idea is proposed on how the design of an instrument could be improved for it to
be viable for measuring noun biases.
