The Development of Spatial Language in Children acquiring English
How do children learn to categorize spatial relationships using language? While there is a fascinating literature on children's early sensitivity to spatial concepts such as containment, 'tight-fit', support, etc. in the first two years of life, we know less about changes in how children organize their spatial semantic categories over several years. In order to investigate this issue, we are conducting a cross-sectional elicited production study to explore how children construct and reorganize their spatial semantic system over time. Using a standardized set of stimuli, we elicit children's use of spatial prepositions in English (e.g., in, on,under, above, etc.) at different ages and compare their patterns of use with those of adult speakers of the same language. In addition to experimental data, we also investigate the use of spatial prepositions in corpora of naturalistic child-caregiver interactions available in the CHILDES database. Eventually we plan to extend our study to monolingual and bilingual learners of other languages.