Choi S, Bowerman M
Department of Linguistics, San Diego State University, CA 92182.
Cognition. 1991 Dec;41(1-3):83-121. doi: 10.1016/0010-0277(91)90033-z.
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.
英语和韩语在如何将运动事件的各个成分词汇化方面存在差异。英语的特点是将运动与方式、原因或指示合并，并单独表达路径。相比之下，韩语在使役性运动的及物从句中，将运动与路径以及图形和背景的元素合并，但在自发运动的不及物从句中，将运动与指示合并，并分别阐明路径和方式。学习英语和韩语的儿童早在17至20个月大时，就对他们谈论运动的方式中特定于语言的模式表现出敏感性。例如，英语学习者会很快将他们最早的空间词汇——如up、down和in等路径小品词——推广到自发的和由外力引起的位置变化上，对于up和down，还会推广到姿势变化上，而韩语学习者则严格区分自发运动和由外力引起的运动的词汇，并对垂直位置变化和姿势变化使用不同的词汇。这些发现挑战了一种广泛的观点，即儿童最初是将空间词汇直接映射到非语言的空间概念上，并表明他们几乎从一开始就受到其语言语义组织的影响。我们讨论了在学习谈论空间的早期阶段，输入和认知可能是如何相互作用的。
