Twila Tardif

Nouns Are Not Always Learned before Verbs: Evidence from Mandarin Speakers' Early Vocabularies.

This article examines D. Gentners (1982) claim that nouns are universally predominant in childrens early vocabularies. 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. When a more liberal definition of nouns was used, neither a noun nor a verb bias was found. Importantly, there was no difference in the type-token ratios of the childrens use of nouns and verbs. Thus, a sampling bias type of explanation cannot explain the prevalence of verbs in these data. Instead, these data suggest the importance of variety of linguistic and sociocultural input factors in early word learning.

Caregiver speech and children's use of nouns versus verbs: A comparison of English, Italian, and Mandarin

This paper examines naturalistic samples of adult-to-child speech to determine if variations in the input are consistent with reported variations in the proportions of nouns and verbs in childrens early vocabularies. It contrasts two PRO-DROP languages, Italian and Mandarin, with English. Naturalistic speech samples from six 2:0 English-, six 1:11 Italian-, and ten 1:10 Mandarin-speaking children and their caregivers were examined. Adult-to-child speech was coded for the type frequency, token frequency, utterance position, and morphological variation of nouns and verbs as well as the types and placements of syntactic subjects and the pragmatic focus of adult questions. Childrens spontaneous productions of nouns and verbs and their responses to adult questions were also examined. The results suggest a pattern consistent with the childrens spontaneous production data. Namely, the speech of English-speaking caregivers emphasized nouns over verbs, whereas that of Mandarin-speaking caregivers emphasized verbs over nouns. The data from the Italian-speaking caregivers were more equivocal, though still noun-oriented, across these various input measures.

PUTTING THE NOUN BIAS IN CONTEXT : A COMPARISON OF ENGLISH AND MANDARIN

Recently, researchers have been debating whether children exhibit a universal “noun bias” when learning a first language. The present study compares the proportions of nouns and verbs in the early vocabularies of 24 English- and 24 Mandarin-speaking toddlers ( M age 5 20 months) and their mothers. Three different methods were used to measure the proportion of noun types, relative to verb types: controlled observations in three contexts (book reading, mechanical toy play, regular toy play), identical across languages; a vocabulary checklist (MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory); and mothers’ reporting of their children’s “first words.” Across all measures, Mandarin-speaking children were found to have relatively fewer nouns and more verbs than English-speaking children. However, context itself played an important role in the proportions of nouns found in children’s vocabularies, such that, regardless of the language spoken, children’s vocabularies appeared dominated by nouns when they were engaged in book reading, but not when they were playing with toys. Mothers’ speech to children showed the same language differences (relatively more verbs in Mandarin), although both Mandarin- and English-speaking mothers produced relatively more verbs than their children. In sum, whether or not language-learning toddlers demonstrate a “noun bias” depends on a variety of factors, including the methods by which their vocabularies are sampled and the contexts in which observations occur.

Theory of Mind Development in Chinese Children: A Meta-Analysis of False-Belief Understanding Across Cultures and Languages

Theory of mind is claimed to develop universally among humans across cultures with vastly different folk psychologies. However, in the attempt to test and confirm a claim of universality, individual studies have been limited by small sample sizes, sample specificities, and an overwhelming focus on Anglo- European children. The current meta-analysis of childrens false-belief performance provides the most comprehensive examination to date of theory-of-mind development in a population of non-Western children speaking non-Indo-European languages (i.e., Mandarin and Cantonese). The meta-analysis consisted of 196 Chinese conditions (127 from mainland China and 69 from Hong Kong), representing responses from more than 3,000 children, compared with 155 similar North American conditions (83 conditions from the United States and 72 conditions from Canada). The findings show parallel developmental trajectories of false-belief understanding for children in China and North America coupled with significant differences in the timing of development across communities-childrens false-belief performance varied across different locales by as much as 2 or more years. These data support the importance of both universal trajectories and specific experiential factors in the development of theory of mind.

Acquisition of mental state language in Mandarin- and Cantonese-speaking children.

Childrens theory of mind appears to develop from a focus on desire to a focus on belief. However, it is not clear (a) whether this pattern is universal and (b) whether it could also be explained by linguistic and sociocultural factors. This study examined mental state language in 10 Mandarin-speaking (21-27 months) and 8 Cantonese-speaking (18-44 months) toddlers. The results suggest a pattern of theory-of-mind development similar to that in English, with early use of desire terms followed by other mental state references. However, the Chinese-speaking children used desire terms much earlier, and the use of terms for thinking was very infrequent, even for Mandarin-speaking adults. This finding suggests a consistency in the overall sequence, but variation in the timing of beginning and end points, in childrens theory-of-mind development across cultures.

What's in a Word? Morphological Awareness and Vocabulary Knowledge in Three Languages.

Understanding how words are created is potentially a key component to being able to learn and understand new vocabulary words. However, research on morphological awareness is relatively rare. In this study, over 660 preschool-aged children from three language groups (Cantonese, Mandarin, and Korean speakers) in which compounding morphology is highly prevalent were tested on their abilities to manipulate familiar morphemes to create novel compound words as well as on a variety of early language and reasoning measures twice over the span of 9 months to 1 year. With Time 1 vocabulary knowledge, phonological processing, and reasoning skills controlled, morphological awareness predicted unique variance in Time 2 vocabulary knowledge across languages. Across languages, vocabulary knowledge also predicted unique variance in subsequent morphological awareness, with Time 1 morphological awareness controlled. Findings underscore the bidirectional bootstrapping of morphological awareness and vocabulary acquisition for languages in which lexical compounding is prominent, and suggest that morphological awareness may be practically important in predicting and fostering childrens early vocabulary learning.

Syllable, phoneme, and tone: Psycholinguistic units in early Chinese and English word recognition

Tasks of word reading in Chinese and English; nonverbal IQ; speeded naming; and units of syllable onset (a phoneme measure), syllable, and tone detection awareness were administered to 211 Hong Kong Chinese children ages 4 and 5. In separate regression equations, syllable awareness was equally associated with Chinese and English word recognition. In contrast, syllable onset awareness was uniquely associated with English reading only, whereas tone detection was uniquely associated with Chinese reading only. Results underscore both the universality of first-language phonological transfer to second-language reading and the importance of different psycholinguistic units (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005) for understanding reading acquisition: Tone units are integral to Chinese character recognition, whereas phonemes are more strongly associated with English word recognition, even within the same children.

The visual word form area: Evidence from an fMRI study of implicit processing of chinese characters

A notable controversy in neurolinguistics is whether there is a particular brain area specialized for visual word recognition within the visual ventral stream. We investigated this question via implicit processing of Chinese characters. Implicit processing of four types of stimuli--real characters, pseudo characters, artificial characters, and checkerboard--in two different sizes, were compared in 14 normal participants using functional MRI (fMRI) with a size judgment task. The results showed that when the three character types were contrasted to one another, there was significantly greater activation in the left middle fusiform gyrus during real and pseudo character processing compared to artificial characters. Moreover, individual analysis revealed that the coordinates were consistent with the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) reported for alphabetic scripts. Results also showed a consistent activation in the left middle frontal gyrus (BA 9) for real and pseudo characters. The relation between this region and the VWFA in Characters processing still needs further investigation.

Developmental Trajectories of Reading Development and Impairment from Ages 3 to 8 Years in Chinese Children.

BACKGROUND Early prediction of reading disabilities in Chinese is important for early remediation efforts. In this 6-year longitudinal study, we investigated the early cognitive predictors of reading skill in a statistically representative sample of Chinese children from Beijing. METHOD Two hundred sixty-one (261) native Chinese children were administered seven language-related skills over three years between the ages of 3 and 6 years. Performances on these skills were then examined in relation to subsequent word reading accuracy and fluency. Individual differences in developmental profiles across tasks were then estimated using growth mixture modeling. RESULTS Four developmental trajectories were classified - the typical (control), catch-up (with low initial cognitive performances but adequate subsequent reading), literacy-related-cognitive-delay (with difficulties in morphological awareness, phonological awareness, and speeded naming and subsequent word recognition), and language-delay (relatively low across all tasks) groups. CONCLUSION Findings suggest that the combination of phonological awareness, rapid naming and morphological awareness are essential in the early prediction of later reading difficulties in Chinese children.

Baby's First 10 Words

Although there has been much debate over the content of childrens first words, few large sample studies address this question for children at the very earliest stages of word learning. The authors report data from comparable samples of 265 English-, 336 Putonghua- (Mandarin), and 369 Cantonese-speaking 8- to 16-month-old infants whose caregivers completed MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories and reported them to produce between 1 and 10 words. Analyses of individual words indicated striking commonalities in the first words that children learn. However, substantive cross-linguistic differences appeared in the relative prevalence of common nouns, people terms, and verbs as well as in the probability that children produced even one of these word types when they had a total of 1-3, 4-6, or 7-10 words in their vocabularies. These data document cross-linguistic differences in the types of words produced even at the earliest stages of vocabulary learning and underscore the importance of parental input and cross-linguistic/cross-cultural variations in childrens early word-learning.