Volume 21, Issue 2

In this introductory chapter to the present special issue about “Space, language and cognition: developmental perspectives”, we introduce some of the main questions that are currently debated concerning the relationships between cognitive and linguistic representations in the domain of space. This collection of papers addresses these questions by bringing together contributions from different disciplines, theoretical perspectives, and methodological approaches. All papers start out with the assumption that spatial cognition is not indifferent to spatial language and aim at specifying how the two might be best related by examining the development of spatial representations in children and adults through language use and acquisition.

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.

Recent studies in language acquisition have paid much attention to linguistic diversity and have begun to show that language properties may have an impact on how children construct and organize their representations. With respect to motion events, Talmy (Towards a cognitive semantics: Concept structuring systems, Cambridge University Press, 2000) has proposed a typological distinction between satellite-framed (S) languages that encode path in satellites, leaving the verb root free for the expression of manner , and verb-framed (V) languages that encode path in the verb, requiring manner to be expressed in the periphery of the sentence. This distinction has lead to the hypothesis (Slobin, From “thought and language” to “thinking for speaking”, Cambridge University Press, 1996) that manner should be more salient for children learning S-languages, who should have no difficulty combining it with path , as compared to those learning V-languages. This hypothesis was tested in a corpus elicited from German children and adults who had to verbalize short animated cartoons showing motion events, and the results are compared with previous analyses of French and English corpora elicited in an identical situation (Hickmann et al., Journal of Child Language, 36: 705–741, 2009). As predicted, and as previously found for English, German children from three years on systematically express both manner (in the verb root) and path (in particles), in sharp contrast to French children, who rarely package manner and path together. These results suggest that, when they are engaged in communication, children construct spatial representations in accordance with the particular properties of their mother tongue. Future research is necessary to determine the extent to which cross-linguistic differences in production may reflect deeper differences in the allocation of attention and in conceptual organization.

Placement verbs describe every-day events like putting a toy in a box. Dutch uses two semi-obligatory caused posture verbs (leggen ‘lay’ and zetten ‘set/stand’) to distinguish between events based on whether the located object is placed horizontally or vertically. Although prevalent in the input, these verbs cause Dutch children difficulties even at age five (Narasimhan and Gullberg, accepted). Children overextend leggen to all placement events and underextend the use of zetten. This study examines what gestures can reveal about Dutch three- and five-year-olds' semantic representations of such verbs. The results show that children gesture differently from adults in this domain. Three-year-olds express only the path of the caused motion, whereas five-year-olds, like adults, also incorporate the located object. Crucially, gesture patterns are tied to verb use: those children who over-use leggen ‘lay’ for all placement events only gesture about path. Conversely, children who use the two verbs differentially for horizontal and vertical placement also incorporate objects in gestures like adults. We argue that children's gestures reflect their current knowledge of verb semantics, and indicate a developmental transition from a system with a single semantic component—(caused) movement—to an (adult-like) focus on two semantic components—(caused) movement-and-object.

Languages vary typologically in their lexicalization of path of motion (Talmy, path to realization: A typology of event conflation: 480–519, 1991). Furthermore, lexicalization patterns are argued to affect syntactic packaging at the level of the clause (e.g., Slobin, Two ways to travel: Verbs of motion in English and Spanish, Oxford University Press, 1996b) and tend to transfer from a first (L1) to a second language (L2) in second language acquisition (e.g., Cadierno and Ruiz, Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 4: 183–216, 2006). Crosslinguistic and developmental evidence suggests, then, that typological preferences for path expression are highly robust features of a first language. The current study examines the robustness of preferences for path encoding by investigating (1) whether Japanese follows patterns identified for other verb-framed languages like Spanish, and (2) whether patterns established in an L1 can change after acquisition of an L2. L1 performance of native speakers of Japanese with intermediate-level knowledge of English was compared to that of monolingual speakers of Japanese and English. Results showed that monolingual Japanese speakers followed basic lexicalization patterns typical of other verb-framed languages, but with different realizations of path packaging within the clause. Moreover, native Japanese speakers with knowledge of English displayed mixed patterns for lexicalization and expressed significantly more path information per clause than either group of monolinguals. Implications for typology and second language acquisition are discussed.

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.

This article presents the results of a quantitative and qualitative corpus study of the use of the Dutch posture verbs staan (‘stand’), liggen (‘lie’) and zitten (‘sit’) by French-speaking learners of Dutch. In addition to providing a quantified insight into which uses of these verbs prove most problematic to the L2 learners, the study has also revealed three important tendencies. Firstly, in line with the typological differences between French and Dutch (where these verbs behave like noun classifiers), our analysis confirms the French-driven tendency of the learners for underusing these verbs. Secondly, seemingly paradoxical to the previous point, is that these learners occasionally overuse these posture verbs in contexts where no such verb is allowed. Thirdly, our qualitative analysis of errors reveals that the learners operate on grammaticised semantic distinctions drawn from the target language. Even if the categories used by L2 speakers may not be the same as those exploited by native speakers, our analysis suggests that the L2 speakers are thus aware of the patterns in the input and exploit them in a fashion that may not differ all that much in kind from those in L1 acquisition.