A Crosslinguistic Developmental Study of Spatial Thinking and Speaking

人们普遍认为，空间认知的发展是普遍的，先于语言的发展。然而，最近的跨语言研究表明，儿童很早就获得了语言特有的空间语义词汇差异(例如Choi&Amp；Bowerman，1991)。这表明，非语言的空间认知结构可能并不是普遍的，但语言特有的差异指导着空间认知的发展(Slobin，1987)。然而，语言特殊性对非语言空间认知发展的影响一直难以证实。最近对说话过程中自发手势的研究表明，手势揭示了说话人在说话过程中的思维模式(McNeill，1992；Goldin-Meadow，Alibali&Amp；Church，1993)。此外，手势中关于动作事件的信息在跨语言中的差异与语言之间的词汇语义差异是平行的(Muller，1996,1998；Ozyurek&Amp；Kita，1999；McNeill&Amp；Duncan，出版社)。在这项研究的基础上，本研究将调查儿童的自发手势，以此作为他们在学习在他们的言语中编码动作事件的不同语言(英语、土耳其语和日语)的心理表征的指数。所获得的数据将从3岁、5岁和9岁的儿童以及成年说话者那里收集。这些数据将从以下方面进行分析：(A)动作事件元素的词汇和语义发展，(B)这些动作事件元素是如何在发展中呈现在手势中的，以及(C)手势表征的发展如何与语言特定语义区别的习得相匹配。这一结果将有助于更清楚地了解儿童空间关系的非语言表征与他们对其语言的词汇语义范畴的敏感性之间的发展相互作用。

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.