This project investigates the relation between language-specific word meanings and conceptual classifications of spatial relations in English and Korean, from infancy to adulthood. The Pl's prior studies that compare young learners of English and Korean have shown that children acquire language-specific ways of classifying spatial relations from as early as 18 months. The two languages differ significantly in the way they divide up spatial relations for purposes of language. For example, whereas English has spatial words (= spatial semantic categories) such as IN and ON to distinguish between containment (e.g., putting an apple IN a bowl) and support (e.g., putting a cup on the Korean does not have such terms. Instead, Korean has words that distinguish between loose fit (e.g., apple in a bowl) and tight fit (e.g., video cassette in its case; ring on a finger) regardless of containment and support. The proposed work explores two interrelated questions that arise from this finding: (1) How do children learn such language-specific word meanings so early?, and (2) how do these early-acquired word meanings influence nonlinguistic spatial concepts at later stages? The proposed study addresses these questions by investigating the ways in which children and adults distinguish various types of spatial relations. More specifically, the study asks whether preverbal infants--infants who do not yet talk--initially start with a more extensive set of spatial categories than is needed for the language they are learning, and whether older children and adults maintain sensitivity to the same extensive set of spatial categories, or as our preliminary work suggests--channel their attention primarily to distinctions they learned in acquiring their first language(s). Both mono-and hi-lingual speakers of English and Korean are examined to understand more fully the interplay between language and cognition. The proposed study should provide insight into the mechanisms that enable children to acquire language-specific word-meaning systems at a very young age, and the kinds of interactions that take place between language and concept formation in infants, children and adults. ? ?
| Choi, Soonja; Hattrup, Kate (2012) Relative contribution of perception/cognition and language on spatial categorization. Cogn Sci 36:102-29 |
