Early acquisition of nouns and verbs evidence from Navajo

Which words do children learn earliest, and why? These questions bear on the developmental origin of language and its connection to thought. The striking dominance of nouns in early English vocabularies has led researchers to ask whether there is something special about the link between nouns and concrete objects (e.g., Gleitman, Cassidy, Papafragou, Nappa, & Trueswell, 2005; Kako, 2004; Macnamara, 1972). Gentner (1982) proposed a conceptual explanation for this early noun dominance: The mapping between words and experience is easier for nouns because of the greater perceptual learnability of their referents in children’s early experience.