How children express caused motion events in Chinese and English: Universal and language-specific influences

The domain of space presents interesting properties that can best illustrate the debate concerning universal versus language-specific determinants on acquisition. In this context, this study compares children’ spatial expressions in English and Chinese in an experimental situation in which participants described animated cartoons showing caused motion events. Our results show that, irrespective of language, childrenʹs utterances were semantically less dense than adults’ responses, reflecting some universal cognitive constraints at early stages of development. Further, striking crosslinguistic differences are attested: utterance density was significantly higher for Chinese children than for age-matched English children from three to eight years because of the availability in Chinese of an easily accessible resultative verb compound which facilitates the simultaneous encoding of varied motion components. The latter finding highlights the fact that language-specific factors have a significant influence on the acquisition of spatial language.