The present study examined the composition of the early productive
vocabulary of eight Korean- and eight English-learning children and the
morpho-syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic characteristics of their
caregivers' input in order to determine parallels between caregiver input
and early lexical development. Vocabulary acquisition was followed
using maternal diary and checklists for the Korean-learning children
(from a mean age of 1;6 to 1;9) and for the English-learning children
(from a mean age of 1;4 to 1;8). Results showed that both Korean-
learning and English-learning children acquired significantly more
nouns than verbs at the 50-word mark. However, Korean children
learned significantly more verbs than did English-learning children.
The relative ease with which Korean learners, as compared to English
learners, acquired verbs parallels several differences in the linguistic and
socio-pragmatic characteristics of the input addressed to them. Korean-
speaking caregivers presented more activity-oriented utterances, more
verbs, and more salient cues to verbs than did English-speaking
caregivers. These data suggest that both general and language-specific
factors shape the early lexicon.