Spatial Terms: The Acquisition of Multiple Referential and Syntactic Mappings

Priya Shimpi,Heidi Waterfall

doi:10.3389/fcomm.2019.00066

Abstract

The current study used a naturalistic, longitudinal design to investigate how children and parents use a set of early-acquired spatial terms (up, down, in, out, on, off). Measures included the frequency, referential contexts, syntactic frames, and referent-syntax pairings of these words from 14 to 30 months. Results showed that children’s earliest use of these terms related to parents’ referential use, but not to parent frequency of use. During the multi-word period, parent frequency of spatial term use was reflected in children’s frequency of use. Further, children’s most frequent referent-syntax pairings were predicted by these pairings in parents’ speech. The current results indicate that children may initially use referential cues in the acquisition of these terms, and later become sensitive to the relative frequencies of referent-syntax pairings for individual lexical items. This study demonstrates how children use regularities across multiple sources of information in the input during acquisition.

Highlights

While we focus on spatial terms in the current paper, the results of the present study may be used to inform our understanding of the acquisition of other classes of words which encode multiple referential relations and appear in multiple syntactic structures
The studies reviewed in the current paper suggest that children’s earliest acquisition of spatial terms may be shaped by general perceptual non-linguistic factors, causing early use to initially appear similar across languages
The current study investigates the relation between contextual reference and syntactic structures by examining children’s and caregivers’ use of a set of early spatial terms

Summary

Introduction

The present study concerns toddlers’ acquisition of a set of spatial terms (down, off, out, in, on, up) These six terms are among the earliest and most frequent spatial terms in children’s naturalistic speech (Sinha et al, 1994; Smiley and Huttenlocher, 1995). While we focus on spatial terms in the current paper, the results of the present study may be used to inform our understanding of the acquisition of other classes of words which encode multiple referential relations and appear in multiple syntactic structures. The acquisition of spatial terms should be of general interest to cognitive development, since children’s initial uses of these types of words may provide a window into how children integrate spatial and linguistic knowledge (Ferrara et al, 2011; Pruden and Levine, 2017)

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Discussion

Conclusion