Chapter published in:
Social Environment and Cognition in Language Development: Studies in honor of Ayhan Aksu-Koç
Edited by F. Nihan Ketrez, Aylin C. Küntay, Şeyda Özçalışkan and Aslı Özyürek
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 21] 2017
► pp. 179–198

Event perception and language learning

Early interactions between language and thought

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How do children learn relational words such as verbs and prepositions? We present a framework for testing children’s acquisition of relational words. We argue that learning relational language requires first discriminating and abstracting a set of components in events. Children then come to interpret these event components in line with their native language. In this process of trading spaces, infants start from a common non-linguistic base and focus on event components encoding once they start to learn their native language, becoming language-specific interpreters. Not only does language focus attention on particular components of events, but it also might serve as a tool for constructing complex event concepts. We discuss the implications both for first language learning and second language acquisition.
Keywords: event perception, relational language, language and thought, second language
Published online: 18 July 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.21.12gok
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