Resumen

CASART QUINTERO, Yris  y  IRIBARREN PEREZ, Carolina. Proporción de sustantivos y verbos en el habla del cuidador y en el léxico temprano en español. Boletin de Linguistica [online]. 2007, vol.19, n.27, pp.42-69. ISSN 0798-9709.

In this study we examine the proportion of nouns and verbs in caretaker speech and children’s early lexicon in Spanish. We calculated noun and verb frequencies in 3 children’s and their caretaker’s spontaneous speech samples. Caretakers produced more verbs when interacting with the children at all three ages. Children produced more nouns in the first sample; more verbs in the secondsample; and, in the third sample, individual variations were observed.Noun-bias observed at the initial stages seems to be independent of the input. Variations in later samples could be related to the particularities of Spanish, speakers’ individual differences, or certain characteristics of the input, among other factors.

Palabras clave : proportion of nouns and verbs; caretaker speech; lexical development.