A crosslinguistic study of the acquisition of time words in English- and German-speaking children

Autor(en)

Katherine Williams, Anna Andrea Bánki, Gabriela Markova, Stefanie Hoehl, Katherine Tillman

Abstrakt

Unlike English, German contains single words for “the day after tomorrow” (übermorgen) and “the day before yesterday” (vorgestern). How might these cross-linguistic differences influence children’s acquisition of time words? Prior work shows that English-speaking preschoolers learn the deictic status of time words (e.g., yesterday was in the past) long before learning their precise temporal locations (e.g., yesterday was exactly one day ago). Here we ask whether the set of time words influences children’s understanding of proximal (yesterday/tomorrow) and distal (day before yesterday/day after tomorrow) terms. English- and German-speaking 3- to 7-year-olds (N = 253) marked the temporal location of each term relative to today on a calendar template. While children in both language groups demonstrated equal knowledge of deictic status, German speakers were more likely to have precise meanings for proximal and distal items, suggesting that having more alternative time words available may help narrow the scope of children’s meanings.

Organisation(en)

Institut für Psychologie der Entwicklung und Bildung

Externe Organisation(en)

University of Texas, Austin

Journal

Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Band

43

Seiten

679-685

ISSN

1069-7977

Publikationsdatum

2021

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

501005 Entwicklungspsychologie

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/a-crosslinguistic-study-of-the-acquisition-of-time-words-in-english-and-germanspeaking-children(313b09e4-7a02-44d0-a88d-fc0f3c80cafd).html