The Source-Goal asymmetry in spatial language: language-general vs. language-specific aspects

ABSTRACT

Prior research has demonstrated a linguistic asymmetry between the sources and goals of motion events, with goals being mentioned more frequently compared to sources in motion descriptions by both children and adults. Here we explore the potency and features of this asymmetry comparing linguistic production data from children and adults who speak typologically different languages (English vs. Greek). We show that the asymmetry is robust cross-linguistically and can therefore plausibly be considered a shared, potentially universal feature of spatial language. However, the Source-Goal asymmetry does not surface uniformly across different morphosyntactic devices (verbs vs. adpositions) used to encode motion across languages. Thus a shared bias in spatial language interacts with language-specific aspects of spatial encoding.

KEYWORDS:

• Spatial language
• source
• goal
• motion
• Greek
• acquisition

Acknowledgements

This research was partly supported by NSF BCS#312122 to Anna Papafragou. The authors would like to thank the members of the Language and Cognition Lab and the Early Learning Center at UD. Megan Johanson is now at the Educational Service Center of Central Ohio and Stathis Selimis is now affiliated with the University of Thessaly (Volos), the Technological Education Institute of Peloponnese (Kalamata) and the Hellenic Open University (Patras) in Greece.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was partly supported by NSF BCS#312122 to Anna Papafragou for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences.