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的空间语义词汇差异（例如Choi Bowerman，1991）。这表明，非语言的空间认知结构可能不是普遍的，但语言的具体区别指导空间认知的发展（Slobin，1987）。然而，语言特异性对非语言空间认知发展的影响一直难以证明，最近关于说话过程中自发手势的研究表明，手势揭示了说话者在说话过程中的思维模式（麦克尼尔，1992; Goldin-Meadow，Alibali Church，1993）。此外，手势中关于运动事件的信息在跨语言中变化，并且与语言之间的词汇语义差异平行（Muller，1996，1998; Ozyurek Kita，1999;麦克尼尔邓肯，出版中）。在此基础上，本研究将探讨儿童的自发手势作为他们的心理表征的指标，在不同类型的语言-英语，土耳其语和日语-因为他们学习编码的运动事件在他们的speech. Eucated数据将收集使用短动画运动事件作为刺激，从3岁，5岁和9岁的儿童，并从成人扬声器的运动事件。这些数据将被分析方面（a）词汇和语义的发展的元素的运动事件，（B）如何这些元素的运动事件是在手势发展，以及（c）如何发展的手势表示与收购的语言特定的语义区别相匹配。研究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其语言词汇语义类别敏感性之间的相互作用。

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.