Noun versus Verb Bias in Mandarin- English Bilingual Pre-School Children

This study investigated the presence of noun or verb bias in 15 MandarinEnglish bilingual pre-school children. The naturalistic bilingual child-caregiver interactions were tape-recorded for 30 minutes each time. The study also addressed the relationship between children‟s language production and the salient positions of the caregivers‟ language input. The findings show that the bilingual children exhibit a noun bias in their English vocabularies and a verb bias in their Mandarin words. However, more verbs were significantly produced in children‟s Mandarin production as compared to those in English language. In order to determine if there is a correlation between salient positions of nouns and verbs in bilingual caregivers‟ language and children‟s language production of nouns and verbs, a Two-Way Analysis of Variance was used. The results suggest that such hypothesized correlation does exist. Specifically, in Mandarin, caregivers‟ frequency of nouns in the final position of utterances seemed to influence the noun bias displayed in bilinguals‟ early lexicons. In English, the frequency of nouns in the final position of caregivers‟ language input was a robust variable, which was most likely to predict the noun bias manifested in bilingual children‟s early vocabularies.