A CROSS-LINGUISTIC STUDY OF EARLY LEXICAL DEVELOPMENT

Cross-linguistic studies have shown that children can vary markedly in rate, style, and sequence of grammatical development, within and acro ss natural languages. It is less clear whether there are robust cross- linguistic differences in early lexical development, with particular r eference to the onset and rate of growth in major lexical categories ( e.g., nouns, verbs, adjectives and grammatical function words). In thi s study, we present parental report data on the first stages of expres sive and receptive lexical development for 659 English infants and 195 Italian infants between 8 and 16 months of age. Although there are po werful structural differences between English and Italian that could a ffect the order in which nouns and verbs are acquired, no differences were observed between these languages in the emergence and growth of l exical categories. In both languages, children begin with words that a re difficult to classify in adult part-of-speech categories (i.e., ''r outines''). This is followed by a period of sustained growth in the pr oportion of vocabulary contributed by common nouns. Verbs, adjectives, and grammatical function words are extremely rare until children have vocabularies of at least 100 words. The same sequences are observed i n production and comprehension, although verbs are reported earlier fo r receptive vocabulary. Our results are compared with other reports in the literature, with special reference to recent claims regarding the early emergence of verbs in Korean.