Choi S, Gopnik A
Department of Linguistics, San Diego State University, CA 92182, USA.
J Child Lang. 1995 Oct;22(3):497-529. doi: 10.1017/s0305000900009934.
This cross-linguistic study investigates children's early lexical development in English and Korean, and compares caregivers' linguistic input in the two languages. In Study 1, the lexical development of nine Korean children was followed from 1;2 to 1;10 by monthly visits and maternal reports. These Korean data were compared to previously collected English longitudinal data. We find that: (1) Korean children as young as 1;3 use verbs productively with appropriate inflections. (2) Seven of the nine children show a verb spurt at around 1;7; for six of these children the verb spurt occurs before the noun spurt. No such early verb spurt is found in the English data. Unlike in English, both verbs and nouns in Korean are dominant categories from the single-word stage. (3) Korean children express language-specific distinctions of locative actions with verbs. Study 2, a crosslinguistic study of caregivers' input in English and Korean, shows that Korean mothers provide more action verbs but fewer object nouns than American mothers. Also, Korean mothers engage in activity-oriented discourse significantly more than American mothers. Our study suggests that verbs are accessible to children from the beginning, and that they may be acquired early in children who are encouraged to do so by their language-specific grammar and input.
这项跨语言研究调查了儿童在英语和韩语中的早期词汇发展情况，并比较了两种语言中照顾者的语言输入。在研究1中，通过每月一次的家访和母亲的报告，跟踪了9名韩国儿童从1岁2个月到1岁10个月的词汇发展情况。这些韩国数据与之前收集的英语纵向数据进行了比较。我们发现：（1）年仅1岁3个月的韩国儿童就能有效地使用带有适当词形变化的动词。（2）9名儿童中有7名在1岁7个月左右出现动词激增；其中6名儿童的动词激增发生在名词激增之前。在英语数据中未发现这种早期动词激增的情况。与英语不同，韩语中的动词和名词在单词阶段都是主要类别。（3）韩国儿童用动词表达特定语言的方位动作区别。研究2是一项关于英语和韩语中照顾者输入的跨语言研究，结果表明，韩国母亲提供的动作动词比美国母亲多，但宾语名词比美国母亲少。此外，韩国母亲进行以活动为导向的话语交流的频率明显高于美国母亲。我们的研究表明，儿童从一开始就能接触到动词，并且在其特定语言的语法和输入鼓励他们这样做的情况下，他们可能会较早习得动词。
