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The development of locative expressions in English, Italian, Serbo-Croatian and Turkish*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Judith R. Johnston  and
Dan I. Slobin
Judith R. Johnston
Affiliation:
Indiana University
Dan I. Slobin
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Abstract

The ability of children between the ages of 2; 0 and 4; 8 to produce locative pre- or postpositions was investigated in English, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, and Turkish. Across languages, there was a general order of development: (1) ‘in’, ‘on’, ‘under’, and ‘beside’, (2) ‘between’, ‘back’ and ‘front’ with featured objects, (3) ‘back’ and ‘front’ with non-featured objects. This order of development is discussed in terms of nonlinguistic growth in conceptual ability. Language-specific differences in the general pattern of development are discussed in terms of a number of linguistic factors which may facilitate or retard the child's discovery of the linguistic means for encoding concepts.

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Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , October 1979 , pp. 529 - 545
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

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Footnotes

[*]

This study is part of the Berkeley Cross-Linguistic Acquisition Project (Dan I. Slobin, Principal Investigator), carried out with support from the William T. Grant Foundation to the Institute of Human Learning and from NIMH to the Language-Behavior Research Laboratory of the University of California at Berkeley. The investigation was designed in collaboration with Ayhan Aksu, Francesco Antinucci, Thomas G. Bever, Susan Ervin-Tripp, and Ljubica Radulović. We gratefully acknowledge the labours of our testers: Penny Boyes-Braem and Gail Loewenstein Holland in the United States: Rosanna Bosi and Wanda Gianelli in Italy; Ljubica Radulović and Emilia Zalović in Yugoslavia; and Ayla Algar and Alev Orhon in Turkey. Reports of other aspects of the investigation are given in Aksu (1978), Ammon & Slobin (1079) Clancy, Jacobsen & Silva (1976), Radulović (1975), Slobin (1978), and Slobin & Bever (forthcoming).

References

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