Description of Locomotion Events: Language-Specific Patterns in Child-Directed Speech

Abstract

The present paper explores how young children, depending on the provided input, acquire language-specific perspectives in the construal of goal-oriented locomotion events. We recorded parent–child interactions using drawings depicting such events. Czech monolingual pairs (n = 25), Russian monolingual pairs (n = 25), and Russian-German bilingual pairs (n = 22) were recruited for this study. Previous findings (Mertins 2018; Stutterheim et al. 2012) have demonstrated that Russian speakers conceptualize goal-oriented locomotion under the phasal perspective. Czech speakers, on the other hand, rely on the holistic perspective and are thus similar to German native speakers. In languages with a holistic perspective, speakers tend to focus on the endpoints of locomotion events. Therefore, we analyzed their prevalence in the parental language. The analyses revealed that Czech parents produced significantly more endpoints in the description of the critical stimuli than Russian and Russian-German parents. We argue that conceptual preferences and the verbalization of goal-oriented locomotion are input driven and acquired in early childhood.

Keywords:

• Thinking for speaking; conceptual perspectives
• Bilingualism; input; child directed speech

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge support by the Open Access Publication Fund of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).