Is There Really A Noun Bias In Children's Early Lexical Development?

This thesis examines whether there is really a noun bias in children's early productive speech. First, Mandarin-speaking children's first 50 words were studied. Through the analysis of the data collected by HNCELA project group, from the babbling stage to first words period of four subjects named HQY, LSY, AJR and FUX, we concluded that noun bias is not a universal though it really exists in most children. The linguistic input is one factor that accounts for the appearance of more action-labeled words. What is more, nouns do not always appear first from the cases of LSY and FUX.Second, a cross-linguistic study was conducted for the purpose of Mandarin-speaking children and English-speaking children's early productive speech, coming to the conclusion that noun bias does not always exist. Some factors including structural features of a language, the linguistic contexts, activities or situations and the stage or age of the child for speech production should be taken into consideration. They all play a role in children's productive speech.Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 present an introduction to children's early lexical development by reviewing the previous studies on the effects of children's conceptual development and input factors on children's early lexical development, with a description of the significance of language structure, linguistic input, activities and linguistic context as an introduction to the whole thesis.Chapter 3 gives a detailed description on children's first 50 words from a longitudinal study of four subjects of HNCELA group named HQY, LSY, AJR and FUX to analyze the proportions of nouns and verbs in their first 50 words so as to see whether there is really a noun bias and the sequence of the first 50 words so as to see whether nouns are acquired before verbs.Chapter 4 describes in detail by adopting Mandarin data from HQY (a subject of HNCELA), ZSQ (a subject of BJCELA), BB and HY (Tardif transcripts), English data of Eve, Adam and Sarah from the Brown Corpus, to analyze children's early lexical development with a varied age range from 1;06; 16 to 02; 02;07 so as to see whether there really exists a noun bias in children's early productive speech; and follow-up analysis of the role of linguistic contexts triggered by different question frames.The conclusion of the present study is that in the study of Mandarin-speaking children's first 50 words, noun bias is not a universal though it really exists in most children; the linguistic input is one factor that accounts for the appearance of more action-labeled words; and nouns do not always appear first from the cases of LSY and FUX. The cross-linguistic study of Mandarin and English-speaking children's productive speech concluded that noun bias does not always exist. Some factors including linguistic structure, linguistic contexts, activities or situations and the linguistic stage or age of the child for speech production should be taken into consideration. They all play a role in children's productive speech.