Mechanistic Support Language in Colombian Spanish-speakers
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3765/elm.3.5823Keywords:
support relations, mechanical support, cognition, Spanish language, language development, force dynamicsAbstract
Beyond basic spatial relations (e.g., teddy on table), we know little about how children learn to talk about Mechanical Support events (e.g., objects attached/hung from a surface via tape) and map them onto linguistic structures. Moreso, the majority of the research that has been done focuses on children learning English - a language that has several verbs that lexicalize support via a specific mechanism (Levin, 1993; e.g., glue, tape, clip, etc.). The current study seeks to deepen our understanding of spatial language acquisition by diversifying the populations that have been studied. Specifically, 4- to 6-year-old monolingual Spanish-speaking children and adults in Colombia viewed Mechanical Support events (e.g., girl puts paper on door via tape) and were then asked, ‘Can you tell me what my sister did with my toy?’. Both children and adults used Non-Mechanism (e.g., poner = ‘put’, colgar = 'hang') and Mechanism Verbs (e.g., pegar = 'stick'); the use of Mechanism Verbs increased from 4- to 6- years of age. In addition, whether the mechanism was visible in the event influenced how it was mapped to language; when the mechanism was visible (vs. when it was hidden), children and adults were more likely to encode the mechanism in a prepositional phrase (e.g., lo colgó con un gancho = ‘she hung it with a clip’). These findings shed light on the development of Mechanical Support language in Spanish- speaking children, the influence of context - specifically, visibility of mechanism - on language, as well as the lexicalization patterns for encoding physical support in Spanish more generally.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Jennifer Barbosa, Paola Pinzón-Henao, Angelina Pasquella , Paul Muentener, Laura Lakusta

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Published by the LSA with permission of the author(s) under a CC BY 4.0 license.