We investigated object and action naming in youngmonolingual and bilingual children,with the aim ofexploring the noun advantage that has previously beendemonstrated in vocabulary acquisition.Thelanguages involved in the studies are English andCantonese,and the participants were monolingual andbilingual speakers.We found that when naming inEnglish there was an object naming advantage,butwhen naming in Cantonese there was no evidence of anoun advantage.Regression-based analyses werecarried out in order to investigate the variables thatpredicted naming accuracy in the two languages.These revealed that for naming in English,ratedimageability predicted object naming and spokenfrequency predicted action naming,while in Cantoneseimageability and spoken frequency predicted bothobject and action naming.We discuss the results interms of explanations of differences in the noun biasacross languages.
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