The Cognitive Linguistics Reader - Vyvyan Evans
25. Space Under Construction: Language-specific Spatial Categorization in First Language Acquisition
The Cognitive Linguistics Reader - Vyvyan Evans
Melissa Bowerman [+]
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (formerly)
1942-2011
Soonja Choi
San Diego State University
Description
In this essay the authors argue that children actively construct semantic categories from the language they grow into. They provide a synthesis of their research into the acquisition of morphemes expressing spatial relations by Dutch and Korean children and argue that children do more than merely match the 'labels' that language provides with the appropriate fully-formed concepts.