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The hypothesis of a universal preference for nouns over other words has been threatened by studies of children acquiring Asian languages (e.g., Tardif, Gelman, & Xu, 1999) showing less of this noun bias than children acquiring other languages. However, methodological limitations and gaps in the literature have prevented a strong test concerning the existence and magnitude of a noun bias. This study was designed to provide a strong test of the noun bias hypothesis in bilingual children acquiring Mandarin and English, whose vocabulary size in each language fell within 50-300 words. Fifty parents of typically developing bilingual children, 22-30 months of age completed parent report measures of vocabulary (MacArthur-Bates CDI; Putonghua CDI) in both languages. Results of a paired t-test showed that the proportion of Mandarin nouns (38% [36% 40%]) was significantly lower than the proportion of English nouns (55% [52% 57%]), with a mean difference of 16.4% (p <.001). Results weaken the claim that universal cognitive constraints are responsible for the noun bias in early word learning. |
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