How infants acquire the meaning of UNDER and other spatial relational terms
Prof. Dr. Hans Strohner (Bielefeld University)
Prof. Dr. Chris Sinha (University of Southern Denmark, Odense)
Why is it so difficult or even impossible for children of two years to understand instructions containing the preposition UNDER - while they have fewer difficulties with IN and ON?
This question is mainly raised in languages that describe spatial relations by means of prepositions. My Ph.D.-Project attempts an explanation of how children gather the meaning of spatial relations and which role situation plays in understanding language
Two experimental studies with 20 to 26 months old, Polish-speaking infants are at the center of my thesis. In both, the understanding of instructions with a spatial preposition was tested. The first study investigated what infants know about spatial prepositions. The results suggest that infants' semantic knowledge is guided by non-linguistic strategies. However, more than just the two rules formulated in Clark (1973) could be observed. The analysis of these strategies within the frame of Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 1987) showed that they are grounded in infants' intercontextual and situated knowledge, i.e. experiences with objects in a cultural group. These strategies are active in understanding linguistic expressions and help children to react appropriately - this is why I term them co-linguistic rather than non-linguistic.
The second study (a training study) was dedicated to investigate the question of how infants learn a certain preposition. Since at the age studied, they have difficulties to understand UNDER, precisely this preposition was trained. The results suggest that infants can learn to understand instructions containing this preposition within two training sessions. However, their successfull understanding depends on a type of situation. The best learning effect was found in a well-known situation, in which they knew the objects from the training sessions. Infants had difficulties to transfer their knowledge to a situation with a new object. No learning effect was found in the artificial HiK-situation. These findings support the view that in their understanding, infants at this age rely more on contextual and situated cues than on their lexical knowledge.
Clark, E. (1973): Non-linguistic strategies and the acquisition of word meanings. In: Cognition 3: 161 - 182.
Langacker, R. W. (1987): Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Volume 1: Theoretical Prerequisites. Standford, California: Standford University Press.
The dissertation is published and available under
http://archiv.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/disshabi/2002/0026/_index.htm (.ps-format).
Please use this URL for references!
The .pdf-version is available from here:
Title and Introduction (44K)
Table of Contents (23K)
Chapter 1 (128K)
Chapter 2 (188K)
Chapter 3 (725K)
Chapter 4 (65K)
Chapter 5 (2604K)
Chapter 6 (45K)
References (74K)
08-29-2003
