I'm fed up with Marmite—I'm moving on to Vegemite—What happens to the development of spatial language after the very first years?
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Eva-Maria Graf
Abstract
The present article examines children's spatial language during late phases of development. To this end, the spontaneous speech of American English speaking children between 6 and 10 years of age was analyzed within an analytical framework developed in a previous study for spontaneous speech from speakers between 10 and 19 years of age (Graf, The ontogenetic development of literal and metaphorical space in Language, Gunter Narr, 2006). The analysis defined five basic spatial categories and four levels of abstraction in spatial meaning in order to capture all spatial relations and their literal as well as non-literal uses. The results show that the spatial language of speakers between 6 and 10 years of age differs mainly with respect to speakers' preference for literal and metaphorical uses. Compared to the findings in Graf (The ontogenetic development of literal and metaphorical space in Language, Gunter Narr, 2006), the age groups analyzed here may be viewed as the developmental phase during which children and adolescents' will reach the end of their journey towards adult use of spatial reference.
© 2010 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/New York
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Space, language, and cognition: New advances in acquisition research
- Typological constraints on the acquisition of spatial language in French and English
- Children's verbalizations of motion events in German
- What gestures reveal about how semantic distinctions develop in Dutch children's placement verbs
- Changes in encoding of path of motion in a first language during acquisition of a second language
- I'm fed up with Marmite—I'm moving on to Vegemite—What happens to the development of spatial language after the very first years?
- On the use of posture verbs by French-speaking learners of Dutch: A corpus-based study
- Book reviews
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Space, language, and cognition: New advances in acquisition research
- Typological constraints on the acquisition of spatial language in French and English
- Children's verbalizations of motion events in German
- What gestures reveal about how semantic distinctions develop in Dutch children's placement verbs
- Changes in encoding of path of motion in a first language during acquisition of a second language
- I'm fed up with Marmite—I'm moving on to Vegemite—What happens to the development of spatial language after the very first years?
- On the use of posture verbs by French-speaking learners of Dutch: A corpus-based study
- Book reviews
