Here are some general points that we were looking for in marking the questions for Assignment 2. You may have gotten credit for things not on this list, if they were relevant in answering the question. --- Q1: --- This question was getting at the reasons behind the pattern of 60/40 nouns at the earlier age, and 40/60 nouns at the later stage. Some possible points: -- Nouns typically describe things in the "here and now" for the child, while verbs often describe events/states displaced in time from the utterance. -- Verbs are more complex because they: -- express relational info; -- can have many forms. -- Because verbs express relational info among entities, kids have to learn a certain number of nouns before they can learn verbs. --- Q2: --- This question was getting at the relation between the N/V percentages in child speech and child directed speech. Some possible points: -- The N/V proportions for Adam are independent of CDS, rather dictated by factors in Q1. -- Adam's percentages don't directly reflect what he's exposed to in CDS -- he's not learning a class of words faster just because they are more frequent. -- Adam's proportion of verbs is increasing but still not at adult rate, so it's predicted that his proportion will continue to increase to reach adult status. -- Observations about the actual verbs being used in both child speech and CDS (rather than just proportions). --- Q3: --- The first two parts of the question were getting at the actual composition of the Ns and Vs in the two lists. More verbs are in common than nouns -- why? and which ones and why? -- Over different situations, the nouns change more than the verbs because nouns are used in the here and now -- they may be more situation dependent, while verbs may be more generally applicable. -- Some of the words that are re-used are very general ones that would be applicable across situations (mommy, ...) The last question is asking about how this "new" data may influence your original answer to Q1. What we were looking for is the following: Although the *proportion* of nouns goes down in Adam's speech (at least for words of frequency 10 or more), the number of different nouns may be increasing. There are as many new nouns as new verbs across the two ages. So there could be two things wrong with our original conclusions in Q1: The proportion of nouns in the second recording session is less than in the first session, but that may not be indicative of the actual proportion of nouns Adam *knows* because: -- the number of new nouns is high, and he still knows all the old ones as well. -- we're not including words of frequency less than 10. However, some people argued that this "new" data supported their original conclusions, and they were given credit for that as long as their reasoning made sense. Many people did not even answer the question: ie, does this "new" data change your conclusion from Q1?