CAREER: Investigating the Noun Bias in Early Language Acquisition

Children around the world display some striking similarities in the process of language learning. It is important to identify similarities that occur across learning contexts because such similarities provide evidence for the basis of language - what makes humans (but not other animals) capable of learning human languages. And yet, other evidence implies that human infants must considerably adapt their language behaviors to their home environments. This CAREER project investigates how consistencies in learning are flexibly adapted in context by examining early word learning in two unrelated languages. The findings contribute to the development of detailed theories of child language learning that apply to children in educational and clinical settings. The project advances the training of the next generation of scholars and creates educational resources. Across multiple languages, children’s first words are more likely to refer to objects than actions, a cross-linguistic similarity that is colloquially called the “noun bias.” This project investigates the source and strength of this preference across a highly noun-centric language and context and a more verb-centric language and context. The results shed light on what experiences make children more or less likely to focus on nouns and noun-like words during early development. On the one hand, a language itself can be structured in a way that points children’s attention to nouns. On the other hand, the ways that adults communicate with children may also point their attention to nouns. By using a comparative cross-linguistic approach that includes spontaneous conversation, eye tracking, and tests of new word learning, this research pinpoints the nature of the noun preference and deepens understanding of how it is adapted for the specific language and context of a child’s home environment. The findings yield insight into a key part of the evolutionary basis for language: how children come to understand and label the world around them. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.