The Relationship Between Age Of Acquisition And Syntactic Class: An Exploration Of Property Concepts In The Wordbank Database - Info and Reading Options

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It has often been observed in the acquisition literature that nouns are acquired before adjectives or verbs, a phenomenon commonly referred to as "the noun bias". Broadly speaking, there are two competing explanations for the noun bias, one syntactic and the other semantic. The syntactic theory (see e.g. Snedeker & Gleitman, 2004) has it that nouns are acquired early because they are the foundation of argument structure. Verbs need nominal arguments and adjectives need nouns to modify, therefore it is not possible, these theories argue, to use verbs or adjectives without first having nouns. Semantic theories of the noun bias, such as the "Natural Partitions" theory due to Gentner (1982; but ultimately dating to Aristotle), by contrast, argues that nouns are acquired first because they, or at least those nouns that are learned early, refer to things in the world that are easily perceived by learners. Because they are easy for learners to perceive, they are easy to acquire, and are therefore acquired early. In the current study, we provide a novel analysis that explores the relative value of syntactic and semantic factors in explaining age of acquisition for what are called "property concepts" in the linguistic typology literature. The categorial class of property concepts across languages is unstable, with some languages describing them with words of category adjective, and others with nouns, and yet others with verbs. We aim to exploit this crosslinguistic variation in the category of property concept words in order to test the syntactic and semantic explanations of the age of acquisition of words. The key fact of property concept words is that while their meanings are held constant across languages, their category varies. We look at whether there is a relationship between category and age of acquisition using Wordbank (Frank et al, 2021), a database of parental questionnaires concerning children's vocabulary development across a diverse set of languages. If syntax is the driving factor in the explanation of the noun bias, we should find that a word for any given meaning will be learned earlier by children acquiring a language which that meaning is a noun that by children learning a language in which that same meaning is an adjective or a verb. By contrast, semantic theories predict that given that the meaning, and real world referent is the same across languages, crosslinguistic differences in category should make no difference to the age of acquisition of a word with the same meaning across languages. Please see uploaded PDF for further details.

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