BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT Early lexical acquisition in the Wichi language Andrea S. TAVERNA 1 * and Sandra R. WAXMAN 2 1 Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (National Research Council) Formosa, Argentina and 2 Northwestern University, USA *Corresponding author. Instituto de Investigaciones sobre Lenguaje, Sociedad y Territorio, Facultad de Humanidades, Universidad Nacional de Formosa (UNaF), Av. Gutnisky 3200, C.P. 3600 Formosa, Argentina. Tel.: +54 03704-452473; E-mail: andtaverna@gmail.com (Received 16 October 2018; revised 29 May 2019; accepted 15 October 2019) Abstract This research brings new evidence on early lexical acquisition in Wichi, an under-studied indigenous language in which verbs occupy a privileged position in the input and in conjunction with nouns are characterized by a complex and rich morphology. Focusing on infants ranging from one- to three-year-olds, we analyzed the parental report of infants’ vocabulary (Study 1) and naturalistic speech samples of children and their caregivers (Study 2). Results reveal that: (1) although verbs predominate in the linguistic input, children’s lexicons favor nouns over verbs; (2) children’s early noun-advantage decreases, coming into closer alignment with the patterns in the linguistic input at a MLU of 1.5; and (3) this early transition is temporally related to children’s increasing productive command over the grammatical categories that characterize the morphology of both nouns and verbs. These findings emphasize the early effects of language-specific properties of the input, broadening the vantage point from which to view the lexical acquisition process. Keywords: lexical acquisition; cross-linguistic development; Wichi language Introduction Across the world’s communities, infants produce their first words at roughly their first birthdays. This achievement, one that is greeted with special joy by parents, has also attracted considerable research attention. Decades of research has been dedicated to identifying the content of infants’ earliest vocabularies and the mechanisms by which they are acquired. For example, based on considerable evidence that infants’ earliest words are predominantly nouns, researchers went on to identify the mechanism underlying this phenomenon. Some argued that the early advantage for learning nouns over verbs is a universal feature of human language (Gentner, 2006; Gentner & Boroditsky, 2009; Gleitman, Cassidy, Nappa, Papafragou, & Trueswell, 2005; Golinkoff & Hirsh-Pasek, 2008; Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek, McDonough, & Tardif, 2009; McDonough, Song, Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, & Lannon, 2011), but others propose instead that the noun advantage is a consequence of the particular native language being acquired (Tardif, 1996; Tardif, Gelman, & Xu, 1999; Tardif, Shatz, & Naigles, 1997). Current research offers evidence for adopting a more nuanced approach, © Cambridge University Press 2020 Journal of Child Language (2020), 1–21 doi:10.1017/S0305000919000898 terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000919000898 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 200.3.222.18, on 03 Mar 2020 at 11:55:34, subject to the Cambridge Core