Acquisition Of Spatial Language Research Articles

Frames of reference in spatial language acquisition

Languages differ in how they encode spatial frames of reference. It is unknown how children acquire the particular frame-of-reference terms in their language (e.g., left/right, north/south). The present paper uses a word-learning paradigm to investigate 4-year-old English-speaking children’s acquisition of such terms. In Part I, with five experiments, we contrasted children’s acquisition of novel word pairs meaning left-right and north-south to examine their initial hypotheses and the relative ease of learning the meanings of these terms. Children interpreted ambiguous spatial terms as having environment-based meanings akin to north and south, and they readily learned and generalized north-south meanings. These studies provide the first direct evidence that children invoke geocentric representations in spatial language acquisition. However, the studies leave unanswered how children ultimately acquire “left” and “right.” In Part II, with three more experiments, we investigated why children struggle to master body-based frame-of-reference words. Children successfully learned “left” and “right” when the novel words were systematically introduced on their own bodies and extended these words to novel (intrinsic and relative) uses; however, they had difficulty learning to talk about the left and right sides of a doll. This difficulty was paralleled in identifying the left and right sides of the doll in a non-linguistic memory task. In contrast, children had no difficulties learning to label the front and back sides of a doll. These studies begin to paint a detailed account of the acquisition of spatial terms in English, and provide insights into the origins of diverse spatial reference frames in the world’s languages.

Relational congruence facilitates neural mapping of spatial and temporal magnitudes in preverbal infants

Mental representations of space, time, and number are fundamental to our understanding of the world around us. It should come as no surprise that representations of each are functional early in human development, appear to share a common format, and may be maintained by overlapping cortical structures. The consequences of these similarities for early learning and behavior are poorly understood. We investigated this issue by assessing neurophysiological processing of audio-visual temporal and spatial magnitude pairs using event-related potentials (ERPs) with young infants. We observed differential early processing and later enhanced attentional processing for pairings of spatial and temporal magnitudes that were relationally congruent (short visual character paired with a short auditory tone or long visual character paired with a long auditory tone) compared to the same stimuli paired in a relationally incongruent manner (short visual character with the long auditory tone or long visual character with a short tone). Unlike previous studies, these results were not dependent on a redundancy of information between the senses or an alignment of congruent magnitude properties within a single sense modality. Rather, these results demonstrate that mental representations of space and time interact to bias learning before formal instruction or the acquisition of spatial language.

On the First and Second Language Acquisition of Spatial Language

This paper provides a brief overview of some of the main issues concerning the acquisition of spatial language as a first or second language. We first consider spatial language variation and the challenges cross-linguistic language differences present for language learners. We then discuss similarities and differences in first and second language acquisition, concluding with a brief précis of the contributions in this special issue.

How children express caused motion events in Chinese and English: Universal and language-specific influences

The domain of space presents interesting properties that can best illustrate the debate concerning universal versus language-specific determinants on acquisition. In this context, this study compares children’ spatial expressions in English and Chinese in an experimental situation in which participants described animated cartoons showing caused motion events. Our results show that, irrespective of language, children's utterances were semantically less dense than adults’ responses, reflecting some universal cognitive constraints at early stages of development. Further, striking crosslinguistic differences are attested: utterance density was significantly higher for Chinese children than for age-matched English children from three to eight years because of the availability in Chinese of an easily accessible resultative verb compound which facilitates the simultaneous encoding of varied motion components. The latter finding highlights the fact that language-specific factors have a significant influence on the acquisition of spatial language.

Developmental Decline in the Acquisition of Spatial Language

We asked whether there is a developmental decline in the ability to learn the spatial terms of a second language, similar to the age-related decline in mastery of phonology and morphosyntax. Although the semantics of spatial terms may appear to be straightforwardly grounded in spatial cognition and therefore relatively simple, they are known to differ significantly across languages, packaging geometric and functional relationships in different ways, and relying on culture-specific representation of objects. Previous observations suggest that adults learning spatial semantics in a second language do face considerable difficulties (e.g., Ijaz, 1986). To explore why and how learners might find it difficult to learn spatial semantics in a second language, we asked adult native speakers of Spanish and Korean to produce and judge applicability of English spatial prepositions that describe relationships of support, containment, and vertical displacement. The age at which spatial terms were first learned in English (age of immersion) but not years of experience (length of immersion) reliably predicted participants' accuracy, with effects focused on those senses of spatial terms that rely on abstract representation of reference objects. The locus of effects was broadly similar across native Korean and Spanish speakers, suggesting that interference from the first language was not solely responsible for performance. Taken together, these findings suggest maturational constraints on receptivity to spatial semantic input and raise questions about mechanisms that spatial semantic learning may have in common with other areas of language.

Typological constraints on the acquisition of spatial language in French and English

Typological analyses (Talmy, Towards a cognitive semantics, MIT Press, 2000) show that languages vary a great deal in how they package and distribute spatial information by lexical and grammatical means. Recent developmental research suggests that children's language acquisition is constrained by such typological properties from an early age on, but the relative role of such constraints in language and cognitive development is still much debated (Bowerman, Containment, support, and beyond: Constructing typological spatial categories in first language acquisition, Benjamins, 2007; Bowerman and Choi, Space under construction: language-specific categorization in first language acquisition, MIT Press, 2003; Slobin, From ‘thought to language’ to ‘thinking for speaking’, Cambridge University Press, 1996, Slobin, Language and thought online: cognitive consequences of linguistic relativity, MIT Press, 2003a, Slobin, The many ways to search for a frog, Erlbaum, 2003b, Slobin, What makes manner of motion salient? Explorations in linguistic typology, discourse, and cognition, Benjamins, 2006). In the context of this debate, we compare the expression of motion in two data bases of child English vs. French: 1) experimentally induced productions about caused motion (adults and children of three to ten years); 2) spontaneous productions about varied types of motion events during earlier phases of acquisition (18 months to three years). The results of both studies show that the density of information about motion increases with age in both languages, particularly after the age of five years. However, they also show striking cross-linguistic differences. At all ages the semantic density of utterances about motion is higher in English than in French. English speakers systematically use compact structures to express multiple types of information (typically manner and cause in main verbs, path in other devices). French speakers rely more on verbs and/or distribute information in more varied ways across parts of speech. The discussion highlights the joint impact of cognitive and typological factors on language acquisition, and raises questions to be addressed in further research concerning the relation between language and cognition during development.

Why size counts: children's spatial reorientation in large and small enclosures

When mobile organisms are spatially disoriented, for instance by rapid repetitive movement, they must re-establish orientation. Past research has shown that the geometry of enclosing spaces is consistently used for reorientation by a wide variety of species, but that non-geometric features are not always used. Based on these findings, some investigators have postulated a species-universal 'geometric module' that is transcended by the acquisition of spatial language at 6 years. This conclusion has been challenged, however, by findings that children as young as 18 months actually do use features to reorient in larger enclosures than those used in the original experiments. The reason for the room size effect is explored here in five experiments. Collectively, the data on age at which features are first used point to the importance of both restriction of movement in the small space and the fact that features are closer in the small space. In addition, success is seen at younger ages when the target object is adjacent to the feature. These results favor an adaptive combination model of spatial reorientation over a 'module-plus-language' view.

Do Novel Words Facilitate 18‐Month‐Olds’ Spatial Categorization?

Eighteen-month-olds' spatial categorization was tested when hearing a novel spatial word. Infants formed an abstract categorical representation of support (i.e., placing 1 object on another) when hearing a novel spatial particle during habituation but not when viewing the events in silence. Infants with a productive spatial vocabulary did not discriminate the support relation when hearing the same novel word as a count noun. However, infants who were not yet producing spatial words did attend to the support relation when presented with the novel count noun. The results indicate that 18-month-olds can use a novel particle (possibly assisted by a familiar verb) to facilitate their spatial categorization but that the specificity of this effect varies with infants' acquisition of spatial language.

Parallels between spatial cognition and spatial language: Evidence from Williams syndrome

Does the acquisition of spatial language always reflect the characteristics of non-linguistic spatial representation? We explored this question by examining spatial representation and spatial language among children and adults with Williams syndrome, a rare genetic syndrome that gives rise to a pattern of severe spatial impairment together with preserved language. The results of three experiments showed striking evidence for the preservation of axial reference systems together with fragility in representing direction within axes, in both non-linguistic judgments of object location and naming of those locations. These basic properties of the spatial representational systems were observed among WS children and adults and normally developing children, although the WS individuals exhibited noisier performance in both domains. The results indicate that non-linguistic spatial representations and spatial language share structure, even in cases of severe spatial impairment.

Objects, Motions, and Paths: Spatial Language in Children With Williams Syndrome

The acquisition of spatial language is often assumed to be built upon an early-emerging system of nonlinguistic spatial knowledge. We tested this relationship by examining spatial language in children with Williams syndrome (WS), a rare genetic disorder that gives rise to severe nonlinguistic spatial deficits together with relatively spared language. Twelve children with WS, 12 normally developing mental-age matched children, and 12 normal adults described 80 videotaped motion events. Children with WS showed substantial control over key linguistic components of the motion event, including appropriate semantic and syntactic encoding of Figure and Ground objects, Manner of Motion, and Path. The expression of Path, although surprisingly spared, was more fragile among children with WS in contexts plausibly related to their nonlinguistic spatial deficit. The results show strong preservation of the formal aspects of spatial-linguistic knowledge and suggest that the nonlinguistic spatial deficits shown by children with WS have, at most, limited effects on their spatial language. These findings have implications for the relationship between spatial language and other aspects of spatial cognition.