Chang Franklin, Choi Youngon, Ko Yeonjung
Psychology, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom.
Psychology, Chung-Ang University, Seoul, Republic of Korea.
Cognition. 2015 Mar;136:196-203. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2014.11.002. Epub 2014 Dec 11.
The Korean fit distinction has been at the center of a debate about whether language can influence spatial concepts. Most research on this issue has largely assumed that the concepts that support Korean fit terms are signaled by innate abstract visual cues (e.g., relative motion of objects), while linguistic studies in Korean suggest that fit terms are object-specific. To examine this issue, Korean-speaking three- to six year-old children and adults were asked to describe spatial scenes, which varied in object type/relations and visual cues for fit. Both groups relied on the prototypical relation between pairs of objects (e.g., rings tend to fit tightly on fingers) in selecting tight-fit terms, and this dependence increased with age. In contrast to Whorfian and Conceptual tuning accounts (Bowerman & Choi, 2003; Hespos & Spelke, 2004), these results suggest that Korean fit concepts are not entirely innate or abstract.
