Among children’s earliest spatial words are topological forms like ‘in’ and ‘on’. Although these forms name spatial relationships, they also presuppose a classification of ground objects into entities such as “containers” and “surfaces”; hence their relevance for a volume on “spatial entities”. Traditionally, researchers have assumed that semantic categories of space are universal, reflecting a human way of nonlinguistically perceiving and cognizing space. But, as this chapter discusses, spatial categories in fact differ strikingly across languages, and children begin to home in on language-specific classifications extremely early, before age two. Learners do not, it seems, draw only on purely nonlinguistic spatial concepts; they can also actively construct spatial categories on the basis of the linguistic input. Evidence is drawn primarily from research on children learning Korean vs. English.
2024. El componente semántico de Manera en la traducción de verbos de movimiento de italiano a español. European Public & Social Innovation Review 9 ► pp. 1 ff.
Salmon, Elisheva, Dorit Ravid & Elitzur Dattner
2024. Building a Grammatical Network: Form and Function in the Development of Hebrew Prepositions. Language and Speech
Yun, Hongoak & Soonja Choi
2018. Spatial Semantics, Cognition, and Their Interaction: A Comparative Study of Spatial Categorization in English and Korean. Cognitive Science 42:6 ► pp. 1736 ff.
2013. De l’expérience kinesthésique à la structuration prépositionnelle du schème-image du chemin. Corela :11-1
Barnabé, Aurélie
2015. Les prépositions évaluées par le prisme du paradigme cognitif : vers une lecture enactive. Corela :13-2
Choi, Soonja & Kate Hattrup
2012. Relative Contribution of Perception/Cognition and Language on Spatial Categorization. Cognitive Science 36:1 ► pp. 102 ff.
Klippel, Alexander
2012. Spatial Information Theory Meets Spatial Thinking: Is Topology the Rosetta Stone of Spatio-temporal Cognition?. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 102:6 ► pp. 1310 ff.
Tyler, Andrea
2012. Spatial Language, Polysemy, and Cross-Linguistic Semantic Mismatches: Cognitive Linguistics Insights into Challenges for Second Language Learners. Spatial Cognition & Computation 12:4 ► pp. 305 ff.
Stock, Kristin & Claudia Cialone
2011. Universality, Language-Variability and Individuality: Defining Linguistic Building Blocks for Spatial Relations. In Spatial Information Theory [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 6899], ► pp. 391 ff.
Bateman, John
2010. Situating Spatial Language and the Role of Ontology: Issues and Outlook. Language and Linguistics Compass 4:8 ► pp. 639 ff.
HICKMANN, MAYA, PIERRE TARANNE & PHILIPPE BONNET
2009. Motion in first language acquisition: Manner and Path in French and English child language*. Journal of Child Language 36:4 ► pp. 705 ff.
2008. Learning to talk and gesture about motion in French. First Language 28:2 ► pp. 200 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 january 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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