Motion event similarities in English- and Spanish-speaking children

Research maintaining no effect of language on thought (e.g., Li & Gleitman, in press) and examples of linguistic influence on thought (e.g., Lucy, 1992b) abound in the literature. In order to show effects of language on thought (linguistic relativity), it may be necessary to show that very young speakers of different languages think similarly (e.g., Naigles & Eisenberg, 1998). Only after children acquire a particular aspect of language should influences appear in their nonlinguistic thought.;This study developmentally tests effects of linguistic relativity. Motion event description differs in English and Spanish: English uses more manner verbs and locative prepositional phrases (e.g., I'm walking up the hill) and Spanish uses more path verbs with fewer prepositional phrases (e.g., Estoy subiendo la loma/I'm ascending the hill). Two experiments test monolingual Spanish- and English-speaking children's responses to visual motion event stimuli.;Experiment 1 examines nonlinguistic thoughts of 3.5- and 7-year-olds who speak. Spanish or English. Children viewed video stimuli and chose videos that were similar to a target video. Because the verb is a central element of the sentence (see Jackendoff, 1990), theories of linguistic relativity would predict that English speakers develop more manner-oriented perspectives than Spanish speakers. As hypothesized, seven-year-old English speakers chose the video with the same manner as most similar to the target video more often than Spanish-speaking seven-year-olds and both 3.5-year-old groups.;Experiment 2 investigates whether the same children are biased by the lexical tendencies of their language in verb learning. After hearing novel verbs in sentences that syntactically imply that the verb refers to either manner or path, children watched videos showing a path-match and a manner-match and chose the video matching the novel verb.;An interaction effect shows that only seven-year-olds are biased in verb learning. Thus, younger children of different language groups neither appear to learn verbs differently nor do they exhibit nonlinguistic differences. Older children, however, show differences in nonlinguistic thought linked to differences in verb learning predicted by developmental theories of linguistic relativity.