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Casillas, M., Foushee, R., Méndez Girón, J., Polian, G., & Brown, P. (2024). Little evidence for a noun bias in Tseltal spontaneous speech. First Language, 44(6), 600-628. doi:10.1177/01427237231216571.
Abstract
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. -
Brown, P. (2005). What does it mean to learn the meaning of words? [Review of the book How children learn the meanings of words by Paul Bloom]. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 14(2), 293-300. doi:10.1207/s15327809jls1402_6.
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Brown, P. (2005). Linguistic politeness. In U. Ammon, N. Dittmar, K. J. Mattheier, & P. Trudgill (
Eds. ), Sociolinguistics: An international handbook of the science of language and society (pp. 1410-1416). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Abstract
This is an encyclopedia entry surveying research and theoretical approaches to politeness phenomena in language usage. -
Brown, P. (1989). [Review of the book Language, gender, and sex in comparative perspective ed. by Susan U. Philips, Susan Steeleand Christine Tanz]. Man, 24(1), 192.
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