Describe The Distribution Of Nouns Vs. Non-Nouns

⎝ Based on the tables of nouns vs. non-nouns Andrew produces, there are a few ambiguous cases in which some words can either be considered as nouns or verbs. For example, on multiple instances, Andrew enacts imitative verbs of nouns such as, “meow” for the noun kitty and “beep beep” for the noun car. Another instance in which words are categorized as ambiguous is the word “can”. “Can” can also be considered as a nous (“I opened the can”) or a verb (“I can open this”).

a) Describe the distribution of nouns/ pronouns vs. non-nouns at the three ages. What proportion of word types are nouns? What proportion of word tokens are nouns?

- The distribution of nouns/ pronouns is produced less than non-nouns at 14 months by 3 words

- The distribution

Does the extent of the noun bias change over time? What might be responsible for these changes?

Noun bias is a hypothesis that predicts that nouns are acquired earlier and more than verbs because they are more easy and salient to learn by children (Child Language Acquisition, 2014, p. 58). Based on the data extracted from CLAN, this hypothesis does support Andrew’s lexicon to an extent. Over the 3 ages he is being observed at, Andrew’s production of nouns increase, but the non-nouns he produces, outnumbers the nouns he produces.

1. Reflect.

I believe the most appropriate characterization of noun bias depends on the language the child is acquiring, a parent’s teaching strategy and the words that are expose to the child during early language acquisition. Evidently, this evidence can be seen as very strong in English but weak in the Japanese language. Rowland states that, languages like Japanese consist of more verbs that nouns therefore, noun bias would be seen as a weak hypothesis with children who acquire Japanese as their first language (L1) and in this situation, verbs would outnumber the nouns children produce (Child Language Acquisition, 2014, p.