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Learning to use prepositions: a case study*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Michael Tomasello
Michael Tomasello*
Affiliation:
Emory University
*
Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA
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Abstract

The current study documented one child's earliest use of prepositions during her second year of life. The spatial oppositions up-down, on-off, in—out and over—under were first to be learned. These words were all used initially in non-prepositional senses (mostly as holophrastic, verb-like requests for activities) prior to prepositional usage. They were seldom omitted or misused. The prepositions with, by, to, for, at and of were learned later. Four of these were used to express at least two distinct case relationships, and some case relationships (instrumental and dative) were indicated by more than one of these words. These later learned prepositions were not used by adults or learned by the child as holophrases, but rather they were acquired as distinct lexical items by means of analytic learning strategies that employed some form of ‘extraction’ from adult phrases. These words were omitted and misused much more often than the spatial oppositions. Differences in the acquisition pattern of these two groups of prepositions were attributed to linguistic rather than to cognitive factors.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , February 1987 , pp. 79 - 98
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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Footnotes

*

The author would like to thank Jeff Gilden and Sharon Garson for their help with data collation. Also, thanks to Sara Mannle, Jeff Farrar, and Ann Kruger for helpful comments on the manuscript, and to Kim Wallen for help with the figure.

References

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