Notes young children's fast mapping ability for word and fact learning. Finds children's extension of a new word to novel objects from same category but lack of extension for new facts, as replicated by Waxman and Booth, unsurprising. Poses more interesting question: is word learning done solely through more general cognitive systems or through…

Compared the proportions of nouns and verbs in early vocabularies of English- and Mandarin-speaking toddlers and their mothers. Found that Mandarin-speaking children had relatively fewer nouns and more verbs than English-speaking children. When reading books, children's vocabularies were dominated by nouns but not when playing with toys. Mothers…

Phonotactic probability, a measure of the likelihood of occurrence of a sound sequence, appears to facilitate noun learning (H. L. Storkel, 2001). Nouns and verbs, however, tend to differ in rate of acquisition, indicating that word-learning mechanisms may differ across grammatical class. The purpose of the current study was to examine the effect…

This study examined effects of word writing on second language vocabulary learning. In two experiments, English-speaking learners of Spanish attempted to learn 24 Spanish nouns while viewing word-picture pairs. The participants copied 12 target words and wrote nothing for the other 12 target words being studied. Productive vocabulary learning on…

An introductory textbook on Tamil grammar is presented. Tamil is spoken by the majority of the people who live in the State of Tamil Nadu in India. The 35 lessons cover the following: the Tamil alphabet, pronouns, morphophonemic rules, the plural, the imperative, the infinitive and negative imperative, oblique forms and uses, the dative and…

Four experiments examined three- and four-year olds' interpretations of novel words applied to familiar objects in the sentence frame "This Y is X," where X is a novel word and Y is a familiar count noun. Results indicated that preschoolers understood that the novel words were either proper names or adjectives/mass nouns. (MDM)

Reviews "The Transition from Infancy to Language: Acquiring the Power of Expression" (L. Bloom). Underscores that Bloom's account of word learning represents an ethnographic, theoretic, and research approach that explores development by starting with the child, and looks at the many behaviors of the child and views these in relation to…

Challenges Gentner's (1982) claim that nouns are universally predominant in children's early vocabularies, noting that 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. (MDM)

A critical aspect of the assessment of children's word learning processes is the examination of word knowledge growth over time. The purpose of this study was to examine the types of partial word knowledge (PWK) growth that occurred from 1 exposure to unfamiliar words in text, taking into account the roles of part of speech and individual language…

This paper focuses on aspects of early lexical acquisition in German. There have been conflicting results in the literature concerning both the pattern of vocabulary growth and the composition of the early lexicon. Our study describes the development of various categories of words and questions the preponderance of nouns in spontaneous speech. 32…

A study of the extent to which Spanish and French noun cognates in a 15,000-word corpus have the same or different grammatical gender is presented, and a list of about 750 cognates with differing genders is included. (MSE)

Examines form-similar nouns in early lexical development of a bilingual German/English child, as well as effects of form similarity in picture naming and translation in two groups of German/English children. Results show an effect of form similarity in early lexical development; form similar words occurred frequently in the beginning of the…

This study shows that the noun bias in early vocabularies rests only in part on the acquisition of object names. An analysis of vocabulary composition from 45 children at I;8 indicates that more nouns are acquired than all other word classes but that only about half of the nouns acquired are the names of basic level object classes (BLOCs). (KM)

A study of infant language acquisition investigated the possibility that perceptual or attentional tendencies may guide early word learning by directing infants' attention in linguistically relevant ways. In the experiment, infants aged 9 to 13 months watched a puppet show; with some children, sentences labeling either the objects (noun-frame…