Evidence for a Core Representation for Support in Early Language Development

ABSTRACT

Configurations of support include those that exhibit Support-From-Below (cup on table), as well as those involving Mechanical Support (e.g., stamp on envelope, coat on hook). Mature language users show a “division of labor” in the encoding of support, frequently using basic locative expressions (BE on in English) to encode Support-From-Below but lexical verbs (e.g., stick, hang) to encode cases of Mechanical Support. This suggests that Support-From-Below configurations may best represent the core for the category of support, and could be privileged in supporting early mappings to spatial language. We tested this hypothesis by examining spontaneous productions of children younger than 4 years found in the CHILDES corpora. Children used on to encode Support-From-Below more than other types of support configurations. They also showed clear distinctions in how they mapped different verbs (e.g., BE vs. lexical verbs) to Support-From-Below configurations compared to other support configurations. Analysis of parent language suggests that these observed patterns in children’s language cannot be fully explained by input, although a role for input is likely for children’s encoding of Mechanical Support. Thus, a concept of Support-From-Below may serve as a core representation of support, and hence the privileged spatial representation onto which spatial language for support is mapped.

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Maddy Polen who helped code data and especially to Holly Kobezak and Kali Revilla who helped code and analyze the data and assisted with preparation of this manuscript. This research was supported by NSF grant 1650861 awarded to Laura Lakusta and Barbara Landau.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The current study focuses on clear configurations of physical support (SFB and Mechanical Support) that have been examined and discussed in the previous literature and theory (see Landau et al., 2016). These cases make reference to a clear concrete spatial configuration. Thus, analyses of the preposition on and its partner verbs focus on this circumscribed set of utterances. Although the current study does not aim to examine children’s entire range of on uses, examination of Table 2 (“other”) and Appendix A suggest that even for these qualitatively different relations, children use on, raising a question for future research of how children acquire such varied and often “abstract” uses of on.

2. We collapsed over embedding and adhesion because it was often impossible to differentiate the two in children’s utterances. For example, “Put windows on your house” can mean stick (adhere) the windows on to the house or draw (embed) the windows on the house. Since our goal was to evaluate children’s descriptions of Mechanical Support per se, we collapsed over these two mechanisms.

3. We decided to treat donning as a subtype in the “other” category because donning is not always encirclement (e.g., “hat on head” is not the same as “diaper on”) and donning is seems to be treated as a special type of spatial relation cross-linguistically (e.g., in Dutch and Korean), with distinct verbs encoding different kinds of donning (see Bowerman, 1996). However, even if donning is considered as encircling (thus a subtype of mechanical support), the results remain the same (on used for Mechanical Support in Table 2 remains less than 50%).

4. Four parents had a child that only fell in younger age group and were thus dropped from the analyses.

5. We thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion and motivating us to elaborate more on the effects of lexical resources.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences [1650861].