Abstract:
Early language learning is one of many critical and complex skills children
learn to develop during their young age (Kuhl, 2012). A distinctive fea-
ture of early language learning is the lexical explosion known as the noun
bias. However, opinions about whether the noun bias is truly a bias and if it
is universal across languages di erentiates among researchers. Alternatively,
children could pattern-match relative frequency of nouns, but also verbs from
their received child-directed speech (CDS), without any bias that goes be-
yond their input. This paper, leverages CDS in CHILDES to determine
whether relative noun and verb similarity existed between a child's produced
speech and their parents' CDS on basis of noun-to-verb ratios and word type
distributions. A comparison of parent and child word distributions exhibited
signi cant di erences in 24 out of 45 age bins for noun usage and 4 out of
41 age bins for verb usage, where each age bin contained conversation data
of children at a speci c 3-month age interval. Found results indicated that,
especially at early and later ages, English-speaking children more often dif-
ferentiate in noun usage than in their verb usage. Furthermore, noun-to-verb
ratios of CDS and its corresponding child speech became progressively more
correlated during the course of the child's early to mid-early age (between
19 and 64 months).
