Henriëtte Hendriks

Cohesion and Anaphora in Children's Narratives: A Comparison of English, French, German, and Mandarin Chinese.

The aim of this study is to determine universal vs. language-specific aspects of childrens ability to organize cohesive anaphoric relations in discourse. Analyses examine narratives produced on the basis of two picture sequences by subjects of four ages (preschoolers, seven-year-olds, ten-year-olds, adults) in four languages: English (n = 80), German (n = 40), French (n = 40), and Mandarin Chinese (n = 40). Particular attention is placed on the impact of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors in determining the uses of referring expressions and of word order in the maintenance of reference to the animate characters. Although subjecthood and agency determine NP position within the clause, role relations in discourse coreference account for NP form in all languages, notwithstanding some variations across languages, ages, and referents (e.g. density of coreference, null elements vs. overt pronouns, clause structures). It is concluded that the development of anaphora is determined by universal pragmatic principles and by language-specific properties characterizing how languages map discourse-internal and sentence-internal functions onto the same forms.

The marking of new information in children's narratives: a comparison of English, French, German and Mandarin Chinese*

This study examines childrens uses of nominal determiners (‘local markings’) and utterance structure (‘global markings’) to introduce new referents. Two narratives were elicited from preschoolers, seven-year-olds, ten-year-olds, and adults in English ( N = 80), French ( N = 40), German ( N = 40), and Chinese ( N = 40). Given typological differences (e.g. richness of morphology), these languages rely differentially on local vs. global devices to mark newness: postverbal position is obligatory in Chinese (determiners optional), indefinite determiners in the other languages (position optional). Three findings recur across languages: obligatory newness markings emerge late (seven-year-olds); local markings emerge first, including Chinese optional ones; local and global markings are strongly related. Crosslinguistic differences also occur: English-speaking preschoolers use local markings least frequently; until adult age global markings are rare in English, not contrastive in German and not as frequent in Chinese as in French, despite obligatoriness. It is concluded that three factors determine acquisition: (1) universal discourse factors governing information flow; (2) cognitive factors resulting from the greater functional complexity of global markings; (3) language-specific factors related to how different systems map both grammatical and discourse functions onto forms.

ASPECT AND ASSERTION IN MANDARIN CHINESE

Chinese has a number of particles such as le, guo, zai and zhe that add a particular aspectual value to the verb to which they are attached. There have been many characterisations of this value in the literature. In this paper, we review several existing influential accounts of these particles, including those in Li and Thompson (1981), Smith (1991), and Mangione and Li (1993). We argue that all these characterisations are intuitively plausible, but none of them is precise.We propose that these particles serve to mark which part of the sentences descriptive content is asserted, and that their aspectual value is a consequence of this function. We provide a simple and precise definition of the meanings of le, guo, zai and zhe in terms of the relationship between topic time and time of situation, and show the consequences of their interaction with different verb expressions within thisnew framework of interpretation.

Static and dynamic location in French and in English

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.

Typological constraints on the acquisition of spatial language in French and English

Abstract Typological analyses (Talmy, Towards a cognitive semantics, MIT Press, 2000) show that languages vary a great deal in how they package and distribute spatial information by lexical and grammatical means. Recent developmental research suggests that childrens language acquisition is constrained by such typological properties from an early age on, but the relative role of such constraints in language and cognitive development is still much debated (Bowerman, Containment, support, and beyond: Constructing typological spatial categories in first language acquisition, Benjamins, 2007; Bowerman and Choi, Space under construction: language-specific categorization in first language acquisition, MIT Press, 2003; Slobin, From ‘thought to language’ to ‘thinking for speaking’, Cambridge University Press, 1996, Slobin, Language and thought online: cognitive consequences of linguistic relativity, MIT Press, 2003a, Slobin, The many ways to search for a frog, Erlbaum, 2003b, Slobin, What makes manner of motion salient? Explorations in linguistic typology, discourse, and cognition, Benjamins, 2006). In the context of this debate, we compare the expression of motion in two data bases of child English vs. French: 1) experimentally induced productions about caused motion (adults and children of three to ten years); 2) spontaneous productions about varied types of motion events during earlier phases of acquisition (18 months to three years). The results of both studies show that the density of information about motion increases with age in both languages, particularly after the age of five years. However, they also show striking cross-linguistic differences. At all ages the semantic density of utterances about motion is higher in English than in French. English speakers systematically use compact structures to express multiple types of information (typically manner and cause in main verbs, path in other devices). French speakers rely more on verbs and/or distribute information in more varied ways across parts of speech. The discussion highlights the joint impact of cognitive and typological factors on language acquisition, and raises questions to be addressed in further research concerning the relation between language and cognition during development.

Convergence of temporal reference frames in sequential bilinguals: event structuring unique to second language users

Previous research suggests that the way grammatical aspect is encoded in the speakers L1 influences event conceptualisation and its subprocesses even in highly advanced L2. Given the lack of consensus regarding the susceptibility to restructuring L1 principles in L2, this work contributes to the debate with two innovative components: it tests whether the susceptibility to adjust L1 (Czech and Hungarian) structuring principles in L2 (English) is dependent on a specific degree of L1-L2 overlap in aspect marking, and it examines unique learner-specific structuring techniques that surface in picture descriptions and film retellings, to illustrate how bilinguals’ temporal reference frames converge. Besides signalling the construction of a unitary conceptual frame, L2 results clearly show the importance of language distance for explaining the nature of sequential bilinguals’ temporal structuring. To embrace the implications of the reported phenomenon, a novel proposal is developed, incorporating grammatical knowledge types already at the stage of conceptualisation.

Space, language, and cognition: New advances in acquisition research

Abstract In this introductory chapter to the present special issue about “Space, language and cognition: developmental perspectives”, we introduce some of the main questions that are currently debated concerning the relationships between cognitive and linguistic representations in the domain of space. This collection of papers addresses these questions by bringing together contributions from different disciplines, theoretical perspectives, and methodological approaches. All papers start out with the assumption that spatial cognition is not indifferent to spatial language and aim at specifying how the two might be best related by examining the development of spatial representations in children and adults through language use and acquisition.

How language impacts memory of motion events in English and French

Abstract This paper examines whether cross-linguistic differences in motion encoding affect event processing, specifically memory performance. We compared speakers of two languages which differ strikingly in how they habitually encode Manner and Path of motion (Talmy in Toward a cognitive semantics: typology and process in concept structuring, 2nd edn, vol 2. MIT Press, Cambridge, 2000). We tested French and English adult native speakers across three tasks that recruited and/or suppressed verbal processing to different extents: verbal event descriptions elicited on the basis of dynamic motion stimuli, a verbal memory task testing the impact of prior verbalisation on target recognition, and a non-verbal memory task, using a dual-task paradigm to suppress internal verbalisation. Results showed significant group differences in the verbal description task, which mirrored expected typological tendencies. English speakers more frequently expressed both Manner and Path information than French speakers, who produced more descriptions encoding either Path or Manner alone. However, these differences in linguistic encoding did not significantly affect speakers’ memory performance in the memory recognition tasks, neither in the verbal nor in the non-verbal condition. The findings contribute to current debates regarding the conditions under which language effects occur and the relative weight of language-specific and universal constraints on spatial cognition.