Maija Surakka, Tampere University
This presentation explores how event cognition, the domain-general cognitive capability, underlies children’s development of the expressions of time. Previous studies have brought forth this interrelation (Ames, 1943; Weist, 1989; Surakka, 2019) but no systematic observation, to my knowledge, has yet been conducted.
In this presentation, I will first review studies that have taken a stand on the mentioned relationship. As a result of my observation, I will outline a developmental path that combines the perspectives of event cognition and linguistic expression of time in children. The path will be presented with empiric examples form the corpus data of the Finnish-speaking children from 2½ to 8 years of age. The corpus has been collected as audio recordings and diary notes. In addition to children’s utterances, the corpus contains information about the people, space, actions, and shared knowledge that took place or were referred to in the usage event.
Capability of perceiving and segmenting action patterns has occurred to be essential in children’s verb acquisition (Golinkoff & Hirsh-Pasek 2006). Expressions of time are typically adverbials that modify the verb element in utterances. Therefore, the perspective of verbs (including tense and aspect) cannot be bypassed when observing the adverbial development. Event cognition (Ibbotson 2020: 58–69) is built on the children’s understanding of action patterns. By development, children become aware of actions being meaningful and having beginnings, ends and inner structure. Actions in an event may occur sequentially or simultaneously; especially when simultaneously, the phenomenon of person perspective joins the cognitive repertoire needed in the interpretation of an event.
The first indication of linguistic action boundary marking (postulating action boundary recognition) in Finnish concerns early verb inflection. In the study of Laalo (2003: 330–333), the child, 18 months of age, formulates a verb form that builds up an early contrast between the present and past tense by uttering loppu ‘ended’ (when the child has finished eating some food). The presentation will shed light on how the development of event cognition being manifest in children’s expressions of time continues at the later phases of development and becomes manifest in temporal adverbials.
The theoretical emphasis of the presentation bases on the Usage-based approach to language acquisition (Tomasello Lieven & Tomasello 2008), the literature on the event cognition (Ibbotson 2020: 58–69), and studies addressing the event-centered conceptualization as the conceptual basis of the expressions of time in children (Ames, 1943; Weist, 1989; Surakka, 2019).
References
Ames, L. B. (1946). The development of the sense of time in the young child. Journal of Genetic Psychology 68(1), 97–126.
Golinkoff, R. M., & Hirsh-Pasek, K. (2006). Introduction: Progress on the verb learning front. In K. Hirsh-Pasek & R. Golinkoff (Eds.), Action Meets Word: How Children Learn Verbs (pp. 3–28). New York: Oxford University Press.
Ibbotson, P. 2020. What it takes to talk. Exploring developmental cognitive linguistics. Berlin: De Gruyter
Laalo, K. (2003). Early verb development in Finnish: A preliminary approach to miniparadigms. In D. Bittner, W. U. Dressler, & M. Kilani-Schoch (Eds.), Development of Verb Inflection in First Language Acquisition: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective (pp. 323–350). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Mouton.
Lieven, E. V. & Tomasello, M. (2008). Children’s first language acquisition from a usage-based perspective. In Robinson, P. & Ellis, N. (Eds.), Handbook of cognitive linguistics and second language acquisition (pp. 168–196). New York: Routledge.
Surakka (2019). Ajan paikka. Ajanilmausten kehityspolkuja lasten kielessä [A location of time. The development of the expressions of time in children’s language]. Publications of the University of Eastern Finland Dissertations in Education, Humanities, and Theology. Joensuu: University of Eastern Finland.
Weist, M. (1989). Time concepts in language and thought: Filling the Piagetian void from 2 to 5 years. In Levin & D. Dakay (Eds.), Time and human cognition. A life-span perspective (pp. 63–118). Advances in psychology 59. Amsterdam: Elsevier.