Abstract
In 2004, Ninio suggested that the process of comprehending noun phrases such as “black shoes” included two steps: comprehending the noun “shoes” and the addition of the attribution “black.” Based on this assumption, Ninio predicted that the developmental process of comprehending noun phrases must progress through a phase in which children understood only the noun. She demonstrated the validity of her assumption through experiments conducted in Hebrew. However, her results were confounded by the word order of the noun phrase in the Hebrew language, in which the noun is the first word and the headword. In this study, we used Japanese phrases to eliminate the artifacts of the above study, because in the Japanese language, the noun is neither the first word in a noun phrase, nor the headword in an adjective phrase. Results indicated that also in Japanese, there is a developmental phase in which children comprehended only the noun in the noun phrases, which confirmed Ninio's assumption. However, there was also a phase in which children comprehended only the noun in the adjective phrases. These results cast doubt on Ninio's suggestion that the process of comprehending the noun phrase includes two steps, or that this two-step process results in a phase in which children comprehend phrases based only on the noun. We think current results relate the idea of noun dominance in children's learning of new words as described by Gentner in 1982, and this dominance influences children's attention by directing it to the noun when comprehending phrases.
