Abstract: Children’s early word acquisition differs such that the number of nouns that children acquire is higher than verbs in many languages. This led some researchers to propose a “noun bias” as a cognitive principle for word learning. However, studies of Chinese- and Korean-speaking children found that the ratio of verbs was as high if not higher than nouns in these languages and that the ratio of verbs in both of these languages was higher than in English. To explain these language-specific phenomena, researchers examined the structural characteristics of language and adult-to-child input including factors such as frequency, word order, morphological complexity, and pragmatics. In addition, differences in the methods and contexts in which vocabulary was sampled as well as operational definitions of word class and children’s total vocabulary size could also contribute to differences in estimates across studies. However, to date, those studies that use comparable methods across languages have found consistent differences across languages and this is a rich area for further exploration

Key words: verb, noun, noun dominance, action, object