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Article published In:
Linguistics in the Netherlands 2017
Edited by Sander Lestrade and Bert Le Bruyn
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 34] 2017
► pp. 63–76

Whose side are they on?

Children’s interpretation of perspective-dependent prepositions

| University of Groningen
| University of Groningen

Spatial prepositions express relations between objects in space. A subset of spatial prepositions is ambiguous due to the different perspectives from which these spatial relations can be considered. The ability to consider another person’s perspective is still developing in children. This study investigates how Dutch-speaking children (mean age 10) and adults interpret perspective-dependent spatial prepositions uttered by a speaker. We found that adults took the speaker’s perspective in a third of the cases, whereas children did so in a sixth of the cases. No differences in interpretation emerged between prepositions in assertions and requests, although these different speech acts reflect different speaker intentions. In general, children performed like adults, but less often took the speaker’s perspective with naast compared to voor and achter in assertions. We conclude that 10-year-olds can take another person’s perspective when interpreting spatial prepositions, but, like adults, only do so in a minority of cases.

Keywords: language development, perspective-taking, egocentric perspective, other-centric perspective, reference frame, spatial prepositions
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Point of view in space
    • 1.2Interpreting spatial prepositions
    • 1.3Other-centric perspectives with spatial prepositions
    • 1.4Children’s development of perspective-taking
    • 1.5The current study
  • 2.Methods
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Materials and design
      • Linguistic Description Task
      • Linguistic Instruction Task
      • Visual Perspective-Taking Task
    • 2.3Procedure
    • 2.4Data analysis
    • 2.5Inclusion criteria
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Linguistic Description Task
    • 3.2Linguistic Instruction Task
    • 3.3Visual Perspective-Taking Task
    • 3.4Comparison between tasks
    • 3.5Comparisons between prepositions
      • 3.5.1Prepositions in the Linguistic Description Task
      • 3.5.2Prepositions in the Linguistic Instruction Task
  • 4.Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 23 November 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.34.05huk
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