| dc.description.abstract | Children’s early vocabulary seems to develop in a similar way across languages and cultures regarding rate and route of acquisition, but there is still much individual variation within and across languages. A noun bias has been found in many languages, though there is not yet a consensus on the further composition of vocabularies and whether verbs are more prominent in vocabularies of children speaking languages like Chinese and Korean. In the present study, receptive vocabulary from Swedish-, Korean- and Chinese-speaking children aged 4 to 11 years were examined on the basis of data obtained via the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-4 (PPVT-4). It has been found that vocabulary development is not similar in these three languages: the Chinese-speaking children outperformed the Korean- and Swedish-speaking children. Further, the noun bias were replicated for the children from all three languages, differences between verb knowledge between these children were not found. Suggestions are given on how to revise the translated versions of the PPVT-4, in addition to critical remarks on the current study. | |
