Early acquisition of nouns and verbs across languages is a key issue for
a number of recent studies that question the reality of the ‘noun-bias’
and wonder about the reasons why it exists as they explore the role of
cognitive vs. more language-specific input factors. Addressing this issue,
the present study investigates how the noun and verb word classes
develop in the free speech of a French child between the ages of 1;2 and
2;6, from the perspective of semantic and grammatical development.
The analyses indicate that, in French acquisition, nouns clearly predominate
over verbs until age 1;8 at least, but that verbs are produced
in the early stages. Concrete object names among nouns and concrete
action verbs among verbs were found to be the most prevalent categories,
but they were not the earliest to appear and their distribution revealed
an asymmetry in the conceptual packaging of nouns and verbs. Verb
grammaticalization, assessed through inflection and auxiliary use, lagged
somewhat behind noun grammaticalization, assessed through determiner
use. This result supports the hypothesized noun–verb grammatical
asynchrony. Verb grammaticalization seems to be related to the
production of concrete action verbs, and noun grammaticalization to
that of concrete object nouns, indicating interactions between semantic
and grammatical development. These findings, discussed in a cross-linguistic perspective, suggest that both conceptual and grammatical
packaging are important and interacting factors in noun and verb
development, and argue in favour of a constructivist approach to
language acquisition.