Little evidence for a noun bias in Tseltal spontaneous speech

Bibliographic Data

ID20343815
AuthorsMarisa Casillas (0000-0001-5417-0505, The University of Chicago, USA, corresponding author), Rusty Foushee (0000-0002-8361-1725, New School), Juan Méndez Girón, Gilles Polian (0000-0002-0642-2875, Centro de Investigación y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social Sureste, Mexico), Penelope Brown (0000-0001-8487-7106, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands)
Year2024
Volume44
Issue6
Pages600-628
Publication date2024-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueFirst Language (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0142-7237 • E-ISSN: 1740-2344
PublisherSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/01427237231216571
OpenAlexW4391492126
LanguageEN
Citations received8
References cited57

This study examines whether children acquiring Tseltal (Mayan) demonstrate a noun bias – an overrepresentation of nouns in their early vocabularies. Nouns, specifically concrete and animate nouns, are argued to universally predominate in children’s early vocabularies because their referents are naturally available as bounded concepts to which linguistic labels can be mapped. This early advantage for noun learning has been documented using multiple methods and across a diverse collection of language populations. However, past evidence bearing on a noun bias in Tseltal learners has been mixed. Tseltal grammatical features and child–caregiver interactional patterns dampen the salience of nouns and heighten the salience of verbs, leading to the prediction of a diminished noun bias and perhaps even an early predominance of verbs. We here analyze the use of noun and verb stems in children’s spontaneous speech from egocentric daylong recordings of 29 Tseltal learners between 0;9 and 4;4. We find weak to no evidence for a noun bias using two separate analytical approaches on the same data; one analysis yields a preliminary suggestion of a flipped outcome (i.e. a verb bias). We discuss the implications of these findings for broader theories of learning bias in early lexical development

Cognitive psychology · Grammatical category · Grammatical Gender · Linguistics · Noun · Proper noun · Salience (neuroscience) · Verb · Child and Animal Learning Development · Language Development and Disorders · Psychology · Reading and Literacy Development

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