Static and dynamic location in French and in English

Abstract

Available research (Bowerman & Choi, 2003; Slobin, 1996) shows crosslinguistic differences in how children talk about space, suggesting the impact of languagespecific factors on language acquisition. This study compares the productions of French children aged 3, 4 and 5 years (N = 60) with those of French and English adults (N = 40) in two tasks that required them to locate objects and to describe object displacements. French adults frequently rely on verbs and focus on manner of attachment, whereas English adults frequently rely on satellites and focus on posture or manner of displacement. French children show few age differences between 3 and 5 years, generally following the French pattern from 3 years on, although they also differ from both groups of adults in some respects, showing developmental changes (overgeneralizations in prepositional use, expansion of the verbal lexicon). The discussion highlights the impact of language-specific determinants of acquisition in relation to the typological properties of French and English as verb-framed vs. satellite-framed languages. It is argued that languages invite speakers to rely on different linguistic means (information locus) and to pay attention to different types of information (information focus), thereby inducing different ways of organizing underlying spatial categories.