Noun versus verb bias in Mandarin-English bilingual pre-school children and the influences of caregiver input

This study investigated the presence of noun or verb bias in 15 Mandarin-English bilingual pre-school children in the Philippine context. The naturalistic interactions between the bilingual children and their bilingual caregivers were tape-recorded for 30 minutes each time. The present study also addressed the relationship between children\u27s language production and the salient positions of the caregivers language input with focus on nouns and verbs. Results suggest that the bilingual children exhibit a noun bias in their English vocabularies and a verb bias in their Mandarin words. The t-test was used to test the difference between the frequency of Mandarin and English on the nouns and verbs children used in the interactions. The results show that there was no significant difference between frequency of Mandarin and English on the children\u27s nouns. However, more verbs were significantly produced in children\u27s Mandarin production as compared to those in English language. In order to determine if there is a correlation between salient positions of nouns and verbs in bilingual caregivers language and children\u27s language production of nouns and verbs, a Two-Way Analysis of Variance was used. The results indicate that such hypothesized correlation does exist. Specifically, in Mandarin, caregivers frequency of nouns in the final position of utterances seemed to influence the noun bias displayed in bilinguals early lexicons. In English, the frequency of nouns in the final position of caregivers language input was a robust variable, which was most likely to predict the noun bias manifested in bilingual children\u27s early vocabularies