English and Korean differ in how they lexicalize the components of motion events. English characteristically conflates Motion with Manner, Cause, or Deixis, and expresses Path separately. Korean, in contrast, conflates Motion with Path and elements of Figure and Ground in transitive clauses for caused Motion, but conflates motion with Deixis and spells out Path and Manner separately in intransitive clauses for spontaneous motion. Children learning English and Korean show sensitivity to language-specific patterns in the way they talk about motion from as early as 17-20 months. For example, learners of English quickly generalize their earliest spatial words--Path particles like up, down, and in--to both spontaneous and caused changes of location and, for up and down, to posture changes, while learners of Korean keep words for spontaneous and caused motion strictly separate and use different words for vertical changes of location and posture changes. These findings challenge the widespread view that children initially map spatial words directly to nonlinguistic spatial concepts, and suggest that they are influenced by the semantic organization of their language virtually from the beginning. We discuss how input and cognition may interact in the early phases of learning to talk about space.

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This cross-linguistic study investigates children's early lexical development in English and Korean, and compares caregivers' linguistic input in the two languages. In Study 1, the lexical development of nine Korean children was followed from 1 ;z to 1; 10 by monthly visits and maternal reports. These Korean data were compared to previously collected English longitudinal data. We find that: (1) Korean children as young as 1; 3 use verbs productively with appropriate inflections. (2) Seven of the nine children show a verb spurt at around 1; 7; for six of these children the verb spurt occurs before the noun spurt. No such early verb spurt is found in the English data. Unlike in English, both verbs and nouns in Korean are dominant categories from the singleword stage. (3) Korean children express language-specific distinctions of locative actions with verbs. Study 2, a crosslinguistic study of caregivers' input in English and Korean, shows that Korean mothers provide more action verbs but fewer object nouns than American mothers. Also, Korean mothers engage in activity-oriented discourse significantly more than American mothers. Our study suggests that verbs are accessible to children from the beginning, and that they may be acquired early in children who are encouraged to do so by their language-specific grammar and input.

Concepts of containment, support, and degree of fit were investigated using nonverbal, preferential-looking tasks with 9-to 14-month-old infants and adults who were fluent in either English or Korean. Two contrasts were tested: tight containment vs. loose support (grammaticized as ÔinÕ and ÔonÕ in English by spatial prepositions and ÔkkitaÕ and ÔnohtaÕ in Korean by spatial verbs) and tight containment vs. loose containment (both grammaticized as ÔinÕ in English but separately as ÔkkitaÕ and ÔnehtaÕ in Korean). Infants categorized both contrasts, suggesting conceptual readiness for learning such spatial semantics in either language. English-speaking adults categorized tight containment vs. loose support, but not tight vs. loose containment. However, Korean-speaking adults were successful at this latter contrast, which is lexicalized in their language. The adult data suggest that some spatial relations that are salient during the preverbal stage become less salient if language does not systematically encode them.

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