Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-42gr6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-17T21:26:43.926Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Nouns and verbs in the vocabulary acquisition of Italian children*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2007

LAURA D'ODORICO  and
MIRCO FASOLO
LAURA D'ODORICO*
Affiliation:
Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca
MIRCO FASOLO
Affiliation:
Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca
*
Address for correspondence: Prof. Laura D'Odorico, Dipartimento di Psicologia, Università di Milano-Bicocca, Piazza dell'Ateneo Nuovo, 1, 20126 – Milano. e-mail: laura.dodorico@unimib.it
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The vocabulary development of 24 Italian children aged between 1 ; 4 and 1 ; 6 at the beginning of the study was longitudinally monitored on a monthly basis using the Italian version of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory drawn up by their mothers. This study analyzes data from children for whom two sampling stages were available; the first corresponding to a vocabulary size as close as possible to 200 words (mean 217, range 167–281), the second to a vocabulary size ranging from 400 to 650 words (mean 518, range 416–648). The children's vocabulary composition was analyzed by calculating, for each sampling stage, the percentage of common nouns, verbs and closed-class words. The increase in percentage points of the various lexical items between the first and second sampling stages was also analyzed. Data confirmed the predominance of nouns over verbs and closed-class words at both sampling stages, while verbs and closed-class words showed a higher percentage increase than nouns. The results provide evidence that children who reached the first sampling point at an earlier age had a higher percentage of nouns than children who reached the same stage at an older age. However, in the passage from the first to the second sampling point no relationship emerged between a style of acquisition based on the acquisition of nouns and an increase in the rate of vocabulary growth.

Type
Note
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 34 , Issue 4 , November 2007 , pp. 891 - 907
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

American Psychological Association (2001). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association, 5th ed. Washington, DC: APA.Google Scholar
Bassano, D. (2000). Early development of nouns and verbs in French: exploring the interface between lexicon and grammar. Journal of Child Language 27, 521–86.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bates, E., Bretherton, I. & Snyder, L. (1988). From first words to grammar: individual differences and dissociable mechanisms. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bates, E., Marchman, V., Thal, D., Fenson, L., Dale, P., Reznick, J. S., Reilly, J. & Hartung, J. (1994). Developmental and stylistic variation in the composition of early vocabulary. Journal of Child Language 21, 85–123.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Camaioni, L. & Longobardi, E. (2001). Noun versus verb emphasis in Italian mother-to-child speech. Journal of Child Language 28, 773–85.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Caselli, M. C., Bates, E., Casadio, P., Fenson, J., Fenson, L., Sanderl, L. & Weir, J. (1995). A cross-linguistic study of early lexical development. Cognitive Development 10, 159–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caselli, M. C. & Casadio, P. (1995). Il primo vocabolario del bambino. Milano: Franco Angeli.Google Scholar
Caselli, M. C., Casadio, P. & Bates, E. (1999). A comparison of the transition from first words to grammar in English and Italian. Journal of Child Language 26, 69–111.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Choi, S. & Gopnik, A. (1995). Early acquisition of verbs in Korean: a cross-linguistic study. Journal of Child Language 22, 497–529.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
D'Odorico, L., Carubbi, S., Salerni, N. & Calvo, V. (2001). Vocabulary development in Italian children: a longitudinal evaluation of quantitative and qualitative aspects. Journal of Child Language 28, 351–72.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fasolo, M. (2004). Nomi e verbi nell'acquisizione del lessico e nella produzione delle prime strutture sintattiche. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Pavia & University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy.Google Scholar
Fasolo, M. & D'Odorico, L. (2002). Vocabulary development of Late-Talking children: a longitudinal research from eighteen to thirty months of age. Rivista di Psicolinguistica Applicata 3, 13–21.Google Scholar
Fenson, L., Dale, P., Reznick, J., Thal, D., Bates, E., Hartung, J., Pethick, S. & Reilly, J. (1993). MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories: User's Guide and Technical Manual. San Diego: Singular.Google Scholar
Gentner, D. (1982). Why nouns are learned before verbs: linguistic relativity versus natural partitioning. In Kuczaj, S. (ed.) Language development, 301–334. Hillsdale: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Gillette, J., Gleitman, H., Gleitman, L. & Lederer, A. (1999). Human simulations of vocabulary learning. Cognition 73, 135–76.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gopnik, A. & Choi, S. (1995). Names, relational words, and cognitive development in English- and Korean-speakers: nouns are not always learned before verbs. In Tomasello, M. & Merriman, W. (eds) Beyond names for things: young children's acquisition of verbs, 63–80. Hillsdale: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Jackson-Maldonado, D., Thal, D., Marchman, V., Bates, E. & Gutierrez-Clellen, V. (1993). Early lexical development in Spanish-speaking infants and toddlers. Journal of Child Language 20, 523–49.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kauschke, C. & Hofmeister, C. (2002). Early lexical development in German: a study on vocabulary growth and vocabulary composition during the second and third year of life. Journal of Child Language 29, 735–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lyytinen, P., Lari, N., Lausvaara, A. & Poikkeus, A. M. (1994). Language skills of Finnish-speaking toddlers. Paper presented at the XIIIth Biennal Meetings of the International Society for the Study of Behavioural Development, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 28 June – 2 July.Google Scholar
Maitel, S., Dromi, E., Sagi, A. & Bornstein, M. H. (2000). The Hebrew Communicative Development Inventory: language specific properties and cross-linguistic generalizations. Journal of Child Language 27, 43–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maratsos, M. (1991). How the acquisition of nouns may be different from that of verbs. In Krasnegor, N., Rumbaugh, D., Schiefelbusch, R. & Studdert-Kennedy, M. (eds) Biological and behavioural determinants of language development, 67–88. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Markman, E. M. (1989). Categorization and naming in children: problems of induction. Cambridge: MIT Press/Bradford Books.Google Scholar
Masson, M. E. J. & Loftus, G. R. (2003). Using confidence intervals for graphically based data interpretation. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology 57, 203–20.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nelson, K. (1973). Structure and strategy in learning to talk. Monograph of the Society for Research in Child Development 38(1–2), 1–135.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pine, J. M. & Lieven, E. V. (1990). Referential style at thirteen months: why age-defined cross-sectional measures are inappropriate for the study of strategy differences in early language development. Journal of Child Language 17, 625–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poulin-Dubois, D., Grahman, S. & Sippola, L. (1995). Early lexical development: the contribution of parental labelling and infants’ categorization abilities. Journal of Child Language 22, 325–43.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Salerni, N., Assanelli, A. & D'Odorico, L. (2005). Production of nouns and verbs by mothers and children at different stages of vocabulary development. Paper presented at the X International Congress for the Study of Child Language, Berlin, Germany, July 25–29.Google Scholar
Tardif, T. (1996). Nouns are not always learned before verbs: evidence from Mandarin speakers' early vocabularies. Developmental Psychology 32, 492–504.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tardif, T., Gelman, S. A. & Xu, F. (1999). Putting the ‘noun bias’ in context: a comparison of English and Mandarin. Child Development, 70 620–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tardif, T., Shatz, M. & Naigles, L. (1997). Caregiver speech and children's use of nouns versus verbs: a comparison of English, Italian, and Mandarin. Journal of Child Language 24, 535–65.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tryon, W. W. (2001). Evaluating statistical difference, equivalence, and indeterminacy using inferential confidence intervals: an integrated alternative method of conducting null hypothesis statistical tests. Psychological Methods 6, 371–86.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed