What Does The Child Say? An Analysis Of Noun an Verb Usage Between Child and Parent

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).