Nouns and verbs in Chintang: children’s usage and surrounding adult speech*

Analyzing the development of the noun-to-verb ratio in a longitudinal corpus of four Chintang (Sino-Tibetan) children, we find that up to about age four, children have a significantly higher ratio than adults. Previous cross-linguistic research rules out an explanation of this in [*] This research was made by possible by Grant Nos. BI 799/1-2 and II/81 961 from the Volkswagen Foundation (DoBeS program). Author contributions: Stoll designed the study; Bickel performed the data extraction and statistical analysis; Stoll, Bickel and Lieven wrote the paper; all authors contributed to the development of the corpus. We warmly thank the children and families in taking part in this study. We are grateful to our Chintang assistants for their work on transcription and translation and our student assistants in Leipzig for their work on glossing and tagging the data. The data reported in this work are deposited and available on request at the DoBeS archive . All data extraction analysis was performed using R (R Development Core Team, 2010), with the additional packages lattice (Sarkar, 2010) and gam (Hastie, 2010). terms of a universal noun bias; instead, a likely cause is that Chintang verb morphology is polysynthetic and difficult to learn. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that the development of Chintang children’s noun-to-verb ratio correlates significantly with the extent to which they show a similar flexibility with verbal morphology to that of the surrounding adults, as measured by morphological paradigm entropy. While this development levels off around age three, children continue to have a higher overall noun-to-verb ratio than adults. A likely explanation lies in the kinds of activities that children are engaged in and that are almost completely separate from adults’ activities in this culture