A Crosslinguistic Developmental Study of Spatial Thinking and Speaking

Trustees Of Boston University, Boston

Investigators

Abstract

It has been a widespread view that the development of spatial cognition is universal and precedes language development. However, recent crosslinguistic research has shown that children acquire the language-specific spatial semantic lexical distinctions of their language quite early (e.g. Choi & Bowerman, 1991). This suggests that non-linguistic spatial cognitive structures might not be universal but that language-specific distinctions guide the development of spatial cognition (Slobin, 1987). However, the influence of language specificity on the development of non-linguistic spatial cognition has been difficult to demonstrate. Recent research on spontaneous gestures during speaking has shown that gestures reveal speakers' thinking patterns during speaking (McNeill, 1992; Goldin-Meadow, Alibali & Church, 1993). Furthermore, the information revealed in gestures about motion events varies crosslinguistically and in parallel ways to the lexical semantic distinctions among languages (Muller, 1996, 1998; Ozyurek & Kita, 1999; McNeill & Duncan, in press). Based on this research, this study will investigate children's spontaneous gestures as an index of their mental representations of motion events in typologically different languages - English, Turkish and Japanese - as they learn to encode motion events in their speech. Elicited data will be collected using short animated motion events as stimuli from children aged 3, 5 and 9 years, and from adult speakers. The data will be analyzed in terms of (a) lexical and semantic development of elements of motion events, (b) how these elements of motion events are presented in gestures developmentally, and (c) how the development of gestural representations matches with the acquisition of language-specific semantic distinctions. The results will contribute to a clearer picture of the interaction in development between children's non-linguistic representations of spatial relations and their sensitivity to the lexical semantic categories of their language.