Abstract

The first stage of lexical development was examined with 563 Korean infants between 8 and 17 months of age. The results show that infants understood 3 times more words than they produced and production reached a 50-word milestone at around 17 months. Also girls produced more words than boys but there was no difference in comprehension. Finally, verbs occupy only 4% of total production vocabulary, whereas nominals(broadly defined) or nouns (narrowly defined) accounted for 71% or 27% of total production vocabulary. The results were compared with English- and Italian-speaking infants‘ data in the literature and revealed more similarities than differences in the composition of early productive vocabularies among different languages.