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Acquisition of nouns and verbs in Italian pre-school children*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2016

LUCIA COLOMBO ,
EDUARDO NAVARRETE  and
BARBARA ARFÉ
LUCIA COLOMBO*
Affiliation:
Dipartimento di Psicologia Generale, Università di Padova
EDUARDO NAVARRETE
Affiliation:
Dipartimento di Psicologia dello Sviluppo e della Socializzazione, Università di Padova
BARBARA ARFÉ
Affiliation:
Dipartimento di Psicologia dello Sviluppo e della Socializzazione, Università di Padova
*
Address for correspondence: e-mail: lucia.colombo@unipd.it
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Abstract

Noun and verb acquisition was investigated in three- and five-year-old Italian children by means of picture naming of objects and actions, selected from Druks and Masterson (2000). The aim was to examine the previously reported advantage of nouns compared to verbs. Older children were faster than younger children, and naming latencies were faster for object pictures than for action pictures. For errors, the advantage of objects over actions was greater for younger children. A qualitative analysis of errors was carried out according to a classification derived by Masterson, Druks, and Gallienne (2008). Overall, 25% of the errors reflected a complete lack of knowledge of the names or of the meanings of the pictures. Most errors, however, were likely to be due to a not yet fully developed knowledge of the meaning of words labelling the pictures, or to an incomplete conceptual representation, and this pattern was more marked for action concepts.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 44 , Issue 6 , November 2017 , pp. 1362 - 1393
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

*

The research was funded by Fondi 60% 2014 from the University of Padova. We wish to thank Jackie Masterson for giving us access to the pictures of the Druks and Masterson (2000) database. We would also like to thank Valentina Mantesso and Lucia Moresco for running the experiment. Preparation of this paper was supported in part by NSF Grant 1349042 to EN.

References

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