Pragmatics and spatial language: The acquisition of front and back.

Abstract

Across languages, children produce locative back earlier and more frequently than front, but the reasons for this asymmetry are unclear. On a semantic misanalysis explanation, early meanings for front and back are nonadult (nongeometric), and rely on notions of visibility and occlusion respectively. On an alternative, pragmatic inference explanation, visibility and occlusion are simply pragmatic aspects of the meaning of front and back; the profile of back can be explained by the fact that occlusion is more noteworthy compared with visibility. We used cross-linguistic data to test these two hypotheses. In Experiment 1, we examined the production and comprehension of front/back by 3- and 4-year-old children and adults speaking two different languages (English and Greek). Children, unlike adults, used back more frequently than front in both languages; however, no such asymmetry surfaced in the comprehension of the two prepositions. In Experiment 2, both adults and children from the same language groups showed the front/back asymmetry when describing a more variable battery of spatial stimuli. Our results support the pragmatic inference hypothesis. We conclude that the emergence of spatial terms does not solely index semantic development but may be linked to pragmatic factors that also shape adults’ production of spatial language cross-linguistically.

A cross‐linguistic study of spatial location descriptions in New Zealand English and Brazilian Portuguese natural language

“…Our study has shown that the spatial relation terms selected in given spatial situations (the same locatum-relatum pair) are not always those predicted by standard translations of spatial relation terms between the two languages, and that often a range of different spatial relation terms are used for a scene that predominantly uses one spatial relation term in the other language. These results were contrary to studies with other romance languages that have shown notable similarities with English , but a number of studies focusing on specific spatial relation terms or groups thereof have confirmed that many cross-linguistic mappings between spatial relation terms are complex (Chuang, 2017;Coventry, Valdés, Castillo, & Guijarro-Fuentes, 2008;Grigoroglou, Johanson, & Papafragou, 2019;Vandeloise, 2017). Most of these studies have focused on particular pairs or groups of terms that are known to be similar, and studied their subtle variations, in contrast to our data-driven approach which enables us to highlight relationships between pairs of terms that would not normally be considered similar, as in Figure 8.…”

Development of spatial language and memory

“…Nevertheless, the case of Front-Behind can be distinguished by notions of visibility (in the case of Front) and occlusion (in the case of Behind). These notions provide an asymmetrical relationship between Front and Behind (see Grigoroglou et al, 2019 for a discussion). Therefore, Front can be distinguished from Behind.…”

“…For spoken languages, linguistic encoding of spatial terms has been found to follow a certain developmental order reflecting the cognitive complexity of the spatial relations reviewed above (1.1.1.). For instance, speaking children first acquire terms such as In-On-Under to refer to viewpoint-independent spatial relations between objects (e.g., Casasola, 2008;Casasola et al, 2003;Clark, 1973;Johnston & Slobin, 1979), followed by viewpoint-dependent relations such as Front-Behind (Durkin, 1980(Durkin, , 1981Grigoroglou et al, 2019;Johnston & Slobin, 1979;Piaget & Inhelder, 1971). Linguistic encoding of viewpoint-dependent Left-Right relations, however, appears later (Abarbanell & Li, 2021;Benton, 1959;Harris, 1972;Piaget, 1972;Rigal, 1994Rigal, , 1996Sümer, 2015).…”

“…All of the studies reviewed above investigate the development of the expressions of spatial relations with speakers/signers who have been exposed to a spoken/sign language immediately following birth (Abarbanell & Li, 2021;Benton, 1959;Casasola, 2008;Casasola et al, 2003;Clark, 1973;Durkin, 1980Durkin, , 1981Grigoroglou et al, 2019;Johnston & Slobin, 1979;Piaget, 1972;Piaget & Inhelder, 1971;Rigal, 1994Rigal, , 1996Sümer, 2015;Sümer et al, 2014;. However, in the case of deaf children, there can be a huge variation concerning the age of exposure to a sign or spoken language.…”

Put the Horse NEXT to the Lake and FAR from the Water Tower: Locative Understanding in Geographic Environments

“…In addition to the age of acquisition, some of these studies have explored the influence of reference frames on locative comprehension (Johnston and Slobin 1979;Cox 1981;Johnston 1984;Conner and Chapman 1985;Bialystok and Codd 1987;Cox and Isard 1990;Coventry, Prat-Sala, and Richards 2001;Grigoroglou, Johanson, and Papafragou 2019). These studies found that young children (e.g., two to three years old) responded to tasks from an egocentric or observer perspective and that this shifted with increasing age to the use of an intrinsic reference frame that was based on object features.…”