0 a word that represents a person, place, object, idea, or activity -- substantiv [ neuter ]
1 a word used as the name of a person, animal, place, state, or thing -- substantiv
The words ‘boy’, ‘James’ and ‘happiness’ are all nouns.
Also, most single word utterances addressed to the target-child consisted of a noun.
The first category comprised single phrase utterances, minimally containing a preposition and a noun.
Most of the recurring verbs (have, do, make) do not establish useful selectional preferences, and most of the noun phrases are actually semantically weak pronouns.
Even for nouns and adjectives, the grammatical classes with the greatest percentage of citation forms, signers chose cf variants 32% of the time.
The discrepancy in the number of different nouns across children was expected since the number of utterances produced varied for each child across samples.
Surprisingly, there were no utterances in which a child combined a novel noun with another noun from her existing vocabulary.
Solid vertical line indicates mean offset of target noun (533 ms).
The overall conclusion is then that from both the phonological and morphological perspective, adjectives behave very much like nouns but unlike verbs.
