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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

Chapter 12
Event perception and language learning

Early interactions between language and thought

| Koç University, Turkey
| Koç University, Turkey | Boğaziçi University, Turkey
| Temple University, USA
| University of Delaware, USA

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
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Trading spaces
  • 3.Nonlinguistic event processing: When and how do children package event components?
    • 3.1Static events
    • 3.2Dynamic events
  • 4.How does learning one’s native language impact event processing?
    • 4.1Labeling event components
    • 4.2Vocabulary knowledge
    • 4.3Expression of events
    • 4.4Language as a mediator
  • 5.Learning more than one language
  • 6.Conclusions
  • References
Published online: 18 July 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.21.12gok
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