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productions of French children aged 3, 4 and 5 years (N = 60) with those of French
and English adults (N = 40) in two tasks that required them to locate objects and to
describe object displacements. French adults frequently rely on verbs and focus on
manner of attachment, whereas English adults frequently rely on satellites and focus
on posture or manner of displacement. French children show few age differences
between 3 and 5 years, generally following the French pattern from 3 years on,
although they also differ from both groups of adults in some respects, showing
developmental changes (overgeneralizations in prepositional use, expansion of the
verbal lexicon). The discussion highlights the impact of language-specific
determinants of acquisition in relation to the typological properties of French and
English as verb-framed vs. satellite-framed languages. It is argued that languages
invite speakers to rely on different linguistic means (information locus) and to pay
attention to different types of information (information focus), thereby inducing
different ways of organizing underlying spatial categories.
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