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, children's 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.

► We compared how English and Chinese children (aged 3–10) describe caused motion events in a cartoon-based experiment.
► We examined the number and the type of information components expressed in children's utterances.
► Irrespective of language, responses expressing multiple information types were significantly less frequent for three-year-olds than for adults.
► The number of information types expressed in responses was significantly higher for Chinese children than for same-aged English children.
► Our results reveal the joint impact of both cognitive and language-specific factors in children's acquisition of spatial language.