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The Spatial Memory Game: Testing the Relationship Between Spatial Language, Object Knowledge, and Spatial Cognition
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Acquisition of demonstratives in cross-linguistic perspective
Holger Diessel1, Sergei Monakhov1
1Friedrich-Schiller-UniversitätJena, Germany.
Journal of Child Language
|May 11, 2022
Summary
Children first use demonstratives like "that" and "there" frequently in language acquisition. As they grow, they shift to more complex language, reducing demonstrative use.
Area of Science:
- Linguistics
- Developmental Psychology
- Language Acquisition
Background:
- Demonstratives are crucial in first language (L1) acquisition.
- Systematic research on demonstrative acquisition is limited.
- Cross-linguistic data on demonstratives is scarce.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the emergence and development of demonstratives in child language.
- To analyze demonstrative acquisition across diverse linguistic backgrounds.
- To understand the role of demonstratives in early communication strategies.
Main Methods:
- Analysis of spontaneous child speech corpora.
- Cross-linguistic comparison of 7 languages (English, French, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, Indonesian).
- Longitudinal data collection from age 1;0 to 6;0.
Main Results:
- Demonstratives are among the earliest and most frequent child words.
- Demonstrative frequency decreases with age and Mean Length of Utterance (MLU).
- Older children increasingly use anaphoric pronouns and adpositions.
Conclusions:
- Children initially rely on deictic communication strategies.
- A developmental shift occurs from body-oriented to abstract reference encoding.
- Preschool years mark a transition in spatial and referential communication.
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