Acquisition of demonstratives in cross-linguistic perspective

Abstract

This paper examines the acquisition of demonstratives (e.g., that, there) from a cross-linguistic perspective. Although demonstratives are often said to play a crucial role in L1 acquisition, there is little systematic research on this topic. Using extensive corpus data of spontaneous child speech, the paper investigates the emergence and development of demonstratives in three European (English, French, Spanish) and four non-European languages (Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, Indonesian) between age 1;0 and 6;0. The data show that, across languages, demonstratives are among the earliest and most frequent child words, but their frequency decreases with age and MLU. As children grow older, they tend to use other types of referring terms (e.g., anaphoric pronouns) and other types of spatial expressions (e.g., adpositions). Considering these results, we hypothesize that children shift from using a body-oriented strategy of deictic communication to more abstract and disembodied strategies of encoding reference and space during the preschool years.

Spatial communication systems across languages reflect universal action constraints

“…Yet such findings have been gleaned from studies examining spatial adpositions across languages and have not considered spatial demonstratives. The early appearance of spatial demonstratives in language development relative to other spatial terms 20 reinforces the centrality of egocentric space across languages.…”

“…Hence, there is substantial variation in the choice of reference frame adopted for spatial language, and our results suggest that demonstrative use is similar. Another possible origin of inter-participant variability may also relate to what has been termed ‘neutral’ 22 or ‘default’ 20 demonstrative use. In English, for instance, ‘that’ can be used at any object location (hence, it can be used as a neutral distance marker), and accordingly ‘this’ is not always used at proximal locations to the speaker.…”

“…Here we consider arguably the most fundamental words in all languages—spatial demonstratives (for example, ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘here’ and ‘there’ in English). Demonstratives occur in all languages 16 , 17 and are among the earliest words to appear in a child’s lexicon 18 – 20 . They are multimodal, more intimately linked to eye gaze and gesture than other spatial terms 21 , 22 .…”

Rethinking how children individuate objects: spatial indexicals in early development

“…Spatial indexicals are among the first words that children use in their early language production, being often the first noncontent words used together with pointing gestures (Clark & Sengul, 1978;Diessel, 2006;Diessel & Monakhov, 2022;González-Peña, 2020;Kita, 2003). They appear in pairs marking a distance contrast ("this"/"that") and are language universal (e.g., Diessel, 2006;but cf.…”

“…Levinson et al, 2018). Across languages, children's use of demonstratives decreases with age while other types of spatial referring terms become more frequent, suggesting that early demonstrative use expresses an initial frame of reference (Diessel & Monakhov, 2022). Spatial indexicals are seen as providing a conceptual frame of reference emerging prior to all other frames (Tanz, 1980).…”