Chapter ten acquisition of locative expressions in children learning

In sign languages, where space is often used to talk about space, expressions of spatial relations may rely on analogue mappings of real space onto signing space. In contrast, spoken languages express space in mostly categorical ways (e.g., adpositions). Whether and to what extent modality influences the acquisition of spatial language is controversial – mostly due to the lack of direct comparisons of deaf children to deaf adults and to age-matched hearing children in similar tasks. Furthermore, previous studies have taken mostly western languages as the model for spoken language development of spatial relations. Therefore, we compare the spatial expressions elicited from Turkish deaf children acquiring Turkish Sign Language (TİD) natively and hearing children acquiring Turkish in two different age-matched groups (preschool age and school age), as well as to those of adults. All participants described three topological spatial configurations (IN, ON, UNDER) of different objects (e.g., apple in box; pen on table). The analysis of the descriptions of these spatial relations does not suggest an effect of modality on the development of static spatial expressions in TİD and Turkish since the deaf children * This work has been supported by European Research Council Starting Grant (ERC) and NWO VIDI grant given to the fourth author as well as by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen. We would like to thank Türkiye İşitme ve Konuşma Rehabilitasyon Vakfı (TİV) and Dosteller İşitme Engelliler Erken Çocukluk Eğitim Merkezi Anaokulu ve İlköğretim Okulu in İstanbul for their support in providing logistics for the study to be carried out.