Overview

This chapter presents a summary of differences in the extent to which English- and Chinese- (Mandarin and Cantonese) speaking children and adults use nouns and verbs in their everyday speech. Specifically, it demonstrates that both child and adult speakers of Chinese use a much larger proportion of verbs in their speech than any data or models based on English would have predicted. In order to account for these findings, it also discusses some relevant structural differences between nouns and verbs in these languages as well as the importance of these differences when designing language tests and stimuli for Chinese. These differences also have significant implications for theoretical models of language development and other processes.

Children's early words: the importance of verbs in Chinese

Over the past decade, several studies of Mandarin- and Cantonese-speaking children's early vocabulary development have provided converging evidence for the fact that Chinese-speaking children's vocabularies have a very different proportion of nouns and verbs than comparable samples of English speakers and speakers of most other languages, except perhaps Korean (see Au, Dapretto & Song, 1994; Choi, 2000; Choi & Gopnik, 1995; Kim, McGregor & Thompson, 2000). Moreover, although individual child characteristics, activity context, and measurement instruments all have significant effects on the extent to which a child's vocabulary may appear to contain nouns or verbs, every context and instrument in which Chinese- and English-speaking children's vocabularies has been compared directly has yielded reliable and highly significant differences.