English-speaking parents tend to use vague, one-size-fits-all verbs as they emphasize nouns: cars, trucks, buses, bicycles and scooters all simply “go.” Mandarin speakers do the opposite: they use catchall nouns such as “vehicle” but describe action—driving, riding, sitting on, pushing—with very specific verbs. “As a native English speaker, my first instinct when a baby points is to label,” Tardif says. Her babysitter, on the other hand, was a native Mandarin speaker, whose instinct was to name the action she thought the child was trying to achieve.
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One of the reasons why it’s so very important to do language acquisition studies on many languages.
Beyond “Mama” and “Dada”: Why Babies Learn Certain Words
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