Different word acquisition of Japanese and English

According to vocabulary checklists, the vocabularies of Japanese-speaking children are smaller than those of English-speaking children. In contrast, Japanese-speaking children learn novel words accurately compared to English-speaking children. We addressed this issue by focusing on Japanese- and English-speaking mothers’ speech to their children. Mothers described video clips of identical events to their 20-month-olds. Japanese-speaking mothers often mixed both adult words (e.g., “dog”) and such infant-directed speech word as onomatopoeias and sound-symbolic words (e.g., “bow-wow”) for target referents. Their number of label types was significantly larger than the English-speaking mothers. These cross-linguistic findings suggest that such differences might contribute to differences in vocabulary growth in children.

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