A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And English-speaking Children's Acquisition Of Spatial Sentences

Everyone lives in the three-dimensional space.Adults need to use locative words and spatial sentences to express their feelings and cognition of the space,so do children.If someone wants to know the world,he or she has to cultivate his or her own spatial cognition ability,which can be shown by spatial expressions.Spatial orientation plays an important role in everyone's life.The acquisition of spatial expressions helps children adapt to the surrounding environment,which benefits to improve children's spatial cognition ability.As a branch of the acquisition of spatial expressions,the acquisition of spatial sentences has high study value,which is popular in the research of children language acquisition.This research uses Image Schema Theory to study and analyze children's early acquisition of spatial sentences and probe the structure and implication of three types of spatial sentences,sentence with Cong35 and from,sentence with Wang214 and towards and sentence with Dao51 and to.Longitudinal method,statistical method and contrastive analysis method are adopted in this research.Thirty-five observation sessions of two Chinese-speaking children MHR(01;09;19-04;11;25),ZHZ(01;09;06-04;11;26)from the longitudinal research and two English-speaking children ADA(02;03;04-04;10;00),SAR(02;08;02-04;11;19)from Brown Corpus are selected to analyze initial appearance,acquisition order and use frequency of three types of spatial sentences,which aims at exploring children's acquisition rules,differences and similarities and analyzing its reasons.Results show that:(1)Chinese-speaking children MHR and ZHZ have the same acquisition order,but English-speaking children ADA and SAR have different acquisition orders.ADA acquires sentence with to first,but SAR acquires sentence withfrom first;(2)Sentence with Dao51 is most frequently used by MHR and ZHZ,sentence with to is most frequently used by ADA and SAR as well;(3)There are three main factors that have an influence on children's acquisition of spatial sentences,they are spatial cognition ability,language complexity and caregivers' input frequency.The main reasons for the acquisition differences are:(I)The individual differences in children's spatial cognition ability affect children's understanding of the semantics and usage of spatial sentences;(2)The influence from the complexity of the language strcture and use requirements;(3)The adults' language input has a positive impact on children's acquisition of spatial sentences.Through the research of children's acquisition rules of spatial sentences,this study hopefully helps children to acquire spatial expressions faster and better and provides some reference for language teaching.