DIFFERENTIAL PRODUCTIVITY IN YOUNG CHILDRENS USE OF NOUNS AND VERBS

A fundamental question of child language acquisition is children's pro ductivity with newly learned forms. The current study addressed this q uestion experimentally with children just beginning to combine words. Ten children between 1;6 and 1; 11 were taught four new words, two nou ns and two verbs, over multiple sessions. All four words were modelled in minimal syntactic contexts. The experimenter gave children multipl e opportunities to produce the words and made attempts to elicit morph ological endings (plural for nouns, past tense for verbs). Overall, ch ildren combined the novel nouns productively with already known words much more often than they did the novel verbs -by many orders of magni tude. Several children also pluralized a newly learned noun, whereas n one of them formed a past tense with a newly learned verb. A follow-up study using a slightly different methodology confirmed the finding of limited syntactic productivity with verbs. Hypotheses accounting for this asymmetry in the early use of nouns and verbs are discussed.