Abstract

The relative strength of role of linguistic inputs and cognitive constraints in the lexical acquisition was debated(Gopnik and Choi, 1990, 1995; Au et al, 1994), especially in Korean. The Korean has been used because of the prevalence and salience of verbs in the input. In this study, early words from 3 Korean children between 18 to 23 months were recorded for 6 months and they were analyzed by category, type, and token. Adults' linguistic input to these children were also recorded. The results clearly supported the cognitive constraints view. Regardless of situational context and analysis methods, more nouns than verbs were recorded in these children's early vocabularies. On the other hand, more verbs than nouns were recorded in the parents' linguistic inputs. These results suggest that constraints on word meanings, more so than natural variations in input, are important for explaining basic patterns of semantic development across languages. The implication of these results were further discussed.