Running or crossing? Children's expression of voluntary motion in English, German, and French

Abstract

Much research has focused on the expression of voluntary motion (Slobin, 2004; Talmy, 2000). The present study contributes to this body of research by comparing how children (three to ten years) and adults narrated short, animated cartoons in English and German (satellite-framed languages) vs. French (verb-framed). The cartoons showed agents displacing themselves in variable Manners along different Paths (Path saliency and variance were specifically manipulated in four item types). Results show an increase with age across languages in how much information participants expressed. However, at all ages, more motion information was encoded in English and German than in French. Furthermore, language-specific features impacted the content and its organization within utterances in discourse, showing more variation within and across Path types in French than in the satellite-framed languages, resulting in later achievement of adult-like descriptions in this language. The discussion highlights the joint impact of cognitive and typological features on language development.

Uyghur–Chinese Adult Bilinguals’ Construal of Voluntary Motion Events

“…But that these constructions occurred only with ACROSS events merit comment. We noted earlier how boundary-crossing events are problematic for L1 and L2 learners due to their inherent conceptual complexity (e.g., Ji et al, 2011b ; Hendriks and Hickmann, 2015 ; Treffers-Daller and Tidball, 2016 ; Hickmann et al, 2018 ; Hendriks et al, 2021 ). And if the atypical constructions indeed signal potential age effects, then it is possible that such effects are more likely to “surface” when the verbalization process involves the form-meaning mapping of a conceptually complex Path trajectory (i.e., boundary crossing).…”

“…Previous studies on child L1 acquisition (cf. Hickmann et al, 2018 ; Hendriks et al, 2021 ) and bilingual acquisition (cf. Tusun, 2019 ; Engemann, 2021 ) have documented the same phenomenon and argued that this may be due to the possibility that boundary crossing poses a unique challenge for children’s verbalization because it involves a conceptually more complex type of path configuration, i.e., categorical change of location, as opposed to other events that involve a gradual change of location (e.g., UP, DOWN, TOWARD, AWAY, ALONG).…”

“…Specifically, the French motion system has been characterized as rather opaque due to the considerable variability adult French speakers show when expressing motion. This variability/opaqueness in the input has been argued to render the acquisition of motion expressions particularly problematic for L1 (e.g., Engemann et al, 2012 ; Hickmann et al, 2018 ; Hendriks et al, 2021 ) and L2 (e.g., Hendriks et al, 2008 ; Hendriks and Hickmann, 2015 ; Engemann, 2016 ) learners alike. In contrast, the Uyghur–Chinese bilinguals deal with two highly systematic and hence transparent motion systems ( Ji et al, 2011a , b , c ; Tusun and Hendriks, 2019 , in press).…”

“…However, speakers of verb-framed languages typically have to employ complex constructions (bi-clausal with subordination) to achieve the same effect (cf. Allen et al, 2007 ; Harr, 2012 ; Hendriks et al, 2021 ) and since doing so may increase online processing load (cf. Özçalışkan and Slobin, 2003 ; Slobin, 2004 ; Özçalışkan, 2015 ), unless the co-event is at issue, speakers typically leave it unspecified and focus on the framing event itself.…”

“…The implications of Talmy's seminal typology for spatial language use has been most extensively examined in relation to Slobin's thinking-for-speaking hypothesis (e.g., Slobin, 1996Slobin, , 2003Slobin, , 2004Slobin, , 2006Daller et al, 2011;Filipović, 2011;von Stutterheim et al, 2017von Stutterheim et al, , 2020Wang and Wei, 2021). And a consistent observation has been that speakers of satelliteframed languages typically produce semantically richer or denser descriptions (mentioning both Path and Manner) while speakers of verb-framed languages tend to produce semantically less rich utterances, focusing primarily on Path (e.g., Slobin, 2004;Özçalışkan, 2015;Hickmann et al, 2018;Tusun and Hendriks, 2019;Bunger et al, 2021;Hendriks et al, 2021). The thinking-for-speaking hypothesis postulates that speakers of typologically distinct languages may not necessarily perceive or conceptualize a given event differently.…”