Part of
Dynamism in Metaphor and BeyondEdited by Herbert L. Colston, Teenie Matlock and Gerard J. Steen
[Metaphor in Language, Cognition, and Communication 9] 2022
► pp. 293–304
Edited by Herbert L. Colston, Teenie Matlock and Gerard J. Steen
[Metaphor in Language, Cognition, and Communication 9] 2022
► pp. 293–304
How to talk about motion without verbs
Infants are fascinated by motion. There is abundant evidence that they are far more interested in motion than in static objects. This would lead us to expect that, in addition to nouns, motion verbs would figure prominently in their early vocabularies. But verbs are late, because they are complex and harder to learn than the names of objects. So infants find other ways to refer to motion. For example, they use prepositions such as up and down to refer to things moving up and down, and social terms such as hi and bye to coming in and going out. Infants talk about motion very early – just not with verbs. This article is dedicated to the memory of Ray Gibbs.
Keywords: motion language, language learning, verbs, meaning, conceptualization
Article outline
- Noun dominance in early language
- The salience of motion in early cognition
- Early words for motion other than verbs
- Nouns
- Prepositions and function words
- Early meanings of up and down
- Early meanings of hi and bye
- Other early words for motion
- Conclusions
-
References
References
Aguiar, A., & Baillargeon, R.
(1999) 2.5-month-old
infants’ reasoning about when objects should and should not be
occluded. Cognitive
Psychology, 39, 116–157. 
Arterberry, M. E., & Bornstein, M. H.
(2001) Three-month-old
infants’ categorization of animals and vehicles based on static and dynamic
attributes. Journal of Experimental Child
Psychology, 80 (4), 333–346.
Au, T. K. F., Dapretto, M., & Song, Y. K.
(1994) Input
vs constraints: Early word acquisition in Korean and English. Journal of Memory
and
Language, 33(5), 567–582.
Bahrick, L. E., Gogate, L. J., & Ruiz, I.
(2002) Attention
and memory for faces and actions in infancy: the salience of actions over faces in dynamic
events. Child
Development, 73, 1629–1643.
Bergelson, E., & Swingley, D.
(2012) At
6–9 months, human. Infants know the meanings of many common nouns. Proceedings
of the National Academy of
Sciences, 109, 3253–3258.
(2013) The
acquisition of abstract words by young
infants. Cognition, 127, 391–397.
Bloom, L.
(1970) Language
development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
(1973) One
word at a time. Mouton: The Hague.
Bornstein, M. H. & Cote, L. R. (with Maital, S., Painter, K., Park, S.-Y., Pascual, L. et al.
) (2004) Cross-linguistic
analysis of vocabulary in young children: Spanish, Dutch, French, Hebrew, Italian, Korean, and American
English. Child
Development, 75, 1115–1139.
Choi, S. & Bowerman, M.
(1991) Learning
to express motion events in English and Korean: The influence of language-specific lexicalization
patterns. Cognition, 41, 83–131.
Choi, S., & Gopnik, A.
(1995) Early
acquisition of verbs in Korean: A cross-linguistic study. Journal of Child
Language, 22, 497–529.
Clark, E. V.
(2003) First
language acquisition. Cambridge University Press.
Dromi, E.
(1987) Early
lexical development. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Fenson, L., Dale, P. S., Reznick, J. S., Bates, E., Thal, D. J., & Pethick, S. J.
(1994) Variability
in early communicative development. Monographs of the Society for Research in
Child
Development, 59, 1–185.
Gentner, D.
(1982) Why
nouns are learned before verbs: linguistic relativity versus natural
partitioning. In S. A. Kuczaj II (Ed.), Language
Development., Vol.2: Language, thought, and culture. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Gentner, D. & Boroditsky, L.
(2001) Individuation,
relativity, and early word learning. In M. Bowerman & S. Levinson (Eds.), Language
acquisition and conceptual development. Cambridge University Press.
(2009) Early
acquisition of nouns and verbs: Evidence from
Navaho. In V. Gathercole (Ed.), Routes
to language: Studies in honor of Melissa Bowerman. Taylor & Francis: New York, NY.
Gleitman, L. R., Cassidy, K., Nappa, R., Papafragou, A., & Trueswell, J. C.
(2005) Hard
words. Language Learning and
Development, 1, 23–64.
Gleitman, L. & Trueswell, J. C.
in
press).
Golinkoff, R. & Hirsh-Pasek, K.
(2008) How
toddlers learn verbs. Trends in Cognitive
Science, 12, 397–403.
Gopnik, A. & Choi, S.
(1995) Names,
relational words, and cognitive development in English and Korean speakers: Nouns are not always learned
before verbs. In M. Tomasello & W. E. Merriman (Eds.), Beyond
names for things. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: Hillsdale, NJ.
Greenfield, P. M. & Smith, J. H.
(1976) The
structure of communication in early language development. New York: Academic Press.
Haith, M. M.
(1980) Rules
that babies look by: The organization of visual activity. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Harris, M., Barrett, M., Jones, D., & Brookes, S.
(1988) Linguistic
input and early word meaning. Journal of Child
Language, 15, 77–94.
Hespos, S. J., & Baillargeon, R.
(2001) Reasoning
about containment events in very young
children. Cognition, 78, 207–245.
Hespos, S. J., & Spelke, E. S.
(2004) Conceptual
precursors to
language. Nature, 430(6998), 453–456.
Kellman, P. J. & Arterberry, M. E.
(2006) Perceptual
development. In W. Damon, D. Kuhn, & R. Siegler (Eds.). The
handbook of child psychology: Cognition, perception, and language, 6th edition (pp.
109–160). John Wiley & Sons.
Kellman, P. J. & Spelke, E. S.
(1983) Perception
of partly occluded objects in infancy. Cognitive
Psychology, 15, 483–524.
Mandler, J. M.
(2010) The
spatial foundations of the conceptual system. Language and
Cognition, 2, 21–44.
(2012) On
the spatial foundations of the conceptual system and its enrichment. Cognitive
Science, 36, 421–451.
(2015) Attention
as the origin of meaning formation. In Marchetti, G., Benedetti, G., & Alharbi, A. (Eds.) Attention
and meaning: The attentional basis of
meaning, (pp. 273–290). Nova Science Publishers: Hauppauge, New York.
Mandler, J. M. & Pagan Canovas, C.
(2014) On
defining image schemas. Language and
Cognition, 6, 510–532.
McCune, L.
(2008) How
children learn to learn language. New York: Oxford University Press.
Nelson, K.
(1973) Structure
and strategy in learning to talk. Monographs of the Society for Research in
Child
Development, 38, 1–135.
Nomikou, I., Rolfing, K., Cimiano, P., Mandler, J. M.
(2019) Evidence
for early comprehension of action verbs. Language Learning and
Development, 15, 64–74.
Pulverman, R., Song, L., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Pruden, S. M., & Golinkoff, R. M.
(2013) Preverbal
infants’ attention to manner and path: Foundations for learning relational
terms. Child
Development, 84, 241–252.
Quinn, P. C.
(2003) Concepts
are not just for objects: Categorization of spatial relation information by
infants. In D. H. Rakison & L. M. Oakes (Eds.), Early
category and concept development. New York: Oxford University Press.
Simion, F., Regolin, L., Bulf, H. A.
Predisposition for biological
motion in the newborn baby. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S
A 2008 Jan 15;105(2):809–13.
Talmy, L.
(1975) Semantics
and Syntax of Motion. In J. Kimball, (Ed.), Syntax
and Semantics, Vol. 4. New York: Academic Press.
Tardiff, T., Gelman, S. A., & Xu, F.
(1999) Putting
the “noun bias” in context: A comparison of English and Mandarin. Child
Development, 70, 620–635.
Tomasello, M.
(1992) First
verbs. Cambridge England: Cambridge University Press.
Tomasello, M. & Todd, J.
(1983) Joint
attention and early lexical acquisition style. First
Language, 4, 197–212.
Woodard, L. R., Gleitman, L. R., & Trueswell, J. C.
(2016) Two-and
three-year-olds track a single meaning during word learning: Evidence for
propose-but-verify. Language Learning and
Development, 12, 252–261.