Language and thought in early development: A comparative study of the expression of motion events in Chinese and American, hearing and deaf children

The Whorfian hypothesis of linguistic relativity maintains that the language one speaks affects the way one interprets the world. The present study explores the issue of linguistic relativity in young children who are in the process of acquiring language by examining the communication of motion events in both home-signers and hearing children in two different linguistic settings---Chinese and American.;Two studies are reported here. Study 1 focused on the communicative systems of the deaf and hearing children at age four. It examined how different elements of motion events are expressed through home-signs by the deaf children and through speech by the hearing children. The deaf children in the study were not exposed to any usable conventional linguistic models. It is found that under such circumstances, they were able to create gestural systems to express all semantic elements of motion events. This suggests that children are able to bring to the language learning situation a set of concepts before conventional language takes effect, and that this is made possible by the resilient property of human language. With linguistic input, it is found that the hearing Chinese and American children conveyed elements of motion events just as their language requires them to. They showed similarities in areas where the two languages are similar and differences in areas where the two languages differ.;Study 2 provided a comparison of the four groups of children---Chinese deaf and hearing, American deaf and hearing-in how they expressed motion events at three different levels: lexical, sentential, and discursive. The study explored the possible Whorfian effects by comparing deaf and hearing children from two different linguistic backgrounds---Mandarin Chinese and English. Taking the notions expressed by the deaf children as the initial states of concepts about motion events, the study found deviations from them by the hearing in the direction of their own languages in some areas but not others. This is interpreted as evidence for the possible influences or limitations that language may exert on the conceptual systems in early language development.