Children’s verbalizations of motion events

Recent studies in language acquisition have paid much attention to linguis-tic diversity and have begun to show that language properties may have an impact on how children construct and organize their representations. With respect to motion events, Talmy (2000) has proposed a typological distinc-tion between satellite-framed (S) languages that encode PATH in satellites, leaving the verb root free for the expression of MANNER, and verb-framed (V) languages that encode PATH in the verb, requiring MANNER to be ex-pressed in the periphery of the sentence. This distinction has lead to the hy-pothesis (Slobin 1996) that MANNER should be more salient for children learning S-languages, who should have no di‰culty combining it with PATH, as compared to those learning V-languages. This hypothesis was tested in a corpus elicited from German children and adults who had to ver-balize short animated cartoons showing motion events, and the results are compared with previous analyses of French and English corpora elicited in an identical situation (Hickmann et al. 2009). As predicted, and as previ-ously found for English, German children from three years on systemati-cally express both MANNER (in the verb root) and PATH (in particles), in sharp contrast to French children, who rarely package MANNER and PATH together. These results suggest that, when they are engaged in communica-tion, children construct spatial representations in accordance with the par-ticular properties of their mother tongue. Future research is necessary to determine the extent to which cross-linguistic di¤erences in productio