The Nature of Nominals Modified by Adjectives in the Input

Research has shown that, when assigning meaning to a novel adjective in experimental settings, young children pay close attention to the noun the novel adjective modifies. Specifically, Mintz and Gleitman (2002) found that young children are more successful in mapping novel adjectives to the correct meaning when the adjective is introduced with a referentially specific noun rather than an underspecified nominal, and Mintz (2005) found that nouns which help establish the category membership of the modified referent facilitate adjective learning. Our study examines whether adjectives in spontaneous child-directed speech do, in fact, appear in the nominal contexts which seem beneficial for adjective acquisition in artificial word learning tasks. The data are drawn from the Roger Brown corpus in CHILDES (MacWhinney, 2000). They consist of all the maternal utterances (N = 6,016) in which nouns and pronouns were modified by one of 272 frequently occurring adjectives. The analyses revealed that referentially specific nouns rather than underspecified nominals or pronouns were proportionately more prevalent (M = 56%, SD = 1%). I