Why are Nouns Learned Earlier Than Verbs? Infant's Multimodal Experiences During Object Play

Young children learn nouns earlier and faster than verbs. The noun dominance is accounted for by the dominant perceptual accessibilities - referents of nouns are more concrete, imageable, and coherent across time and context than the referents of verbs. Despite the differences in the perceptual characteristics of noun and verb referents, we know little about children's perceptual experiences of the referents. The present study documented infants' object viewing experiences when the parent introduced nouns and verbs during parent-child object play. To assess the perceptual dominance of referent objects, we estimated how much and how large the referent object is captured in the infant's visual field by using the pixels. The findings suggest that infants have different perceptual experiences when they hear nouns and verbs, contextualizing the theory of early perceptual dominance in noun learning. The opportunity of promptly coupling the object in view with the heard word can help infants extract the referent from the scenes and maintain attention to the referent. Such multimodal experience serves the establishment of word acquisition.