According to lead study authors Sandra WaxMan and Louis W. Menk of Northwestern University, they compared how infants acquire Korean nouns and verbs. Previous studies have long suggested that in "noun friendly" languages such as English, infants' attention is typically focused on objects that are commonly marked by nouns. "Verb friendly" languages including Korean, Japanese and Hindi include a more privileged status that includes infants' attention which is focused more directly on the actions and relations that would typically be marked by verbs. "Almost all of the research on infants acquiring these "verb-friendly" languages has looked at the nouns and verbs that they produce in their daily lives," said Sudha Arunachalam, lead author of the study and assistant professor of speech and hearing sciences at Boston University, via a press release . "By using an experimental method instead, our approach lets us watch infants acqui...