Chinese

Chinese allows for its nouns to be omitted in regular conversation (e.g. Kids and parents can just say “bring!” without saying who’s the bringer or what’s to be brought). Even so, Chinese moms still distinguish different subclasses of verbs by their sentence forms and Chinese learning children, too, show sensitivity to the sentence structure of verbs. They also seem to learn verbs quicker than English learners!

man carrying books clip art

  • Candan, A., Küntay, A., Yeh, Y., Cheung, H., Wagner, L., & Naigles, L. (2012) Age and language effects in children’s processing of word order. Cognitive Development 27, 205-221.
  • Lee, J. & Naigles, L.R. (2005) Input to Verb Learning in Mandarin Chinese: A Role for Syntactic Bootstrapping. Developmental Psychology 41, 529-540.
  • Lee, J. & Naigles, L. (2008) Mandarin learners use syntactic bootstrapping in verb acquisition. Cognition 106, 1028-1037.
  • Tardif, T., Shatz, M., & Naigles, L. (1997) Caregiver speech and children’s use of nouns versus verbs: A comparison of English, Italian, and Mandarin. Journal of Child Language 24,535-566.