Extra-linguistic modulation of the English noun-bias: evidence from Malaysian bilingual infants and toddlers

Early vocabularies typically contain more nouns than verbs. Yet, the strength of this noun-bias varies across languages and cultures. Two main theories have aimed at explaining such variations; either that the relative importance of nouns vs. verbs is specific to the language itself, or that extra-linguistic factors shape early vocabulary structures. To address this debate, the present study compares the relative distribution of verbs and nouns within the same language—English—between Malay–English and Mandarin–English bilingual infants and toddlers. The English receptive lexicons of Mandarin–English bilingual children contained more verbs than those of Malay–English bilinguals, suggesting that the noun-bias is modulated by factors external to English. We discuss the potential role of socio-cultural differences on the composition of children early vocabularies.