Pragmatics and spatial language: The acquisition of front and back.

Across languages, children produce locative back earlier and more frequently than , but the reasons for this asymmetry are unclear. On a explanation, early meanings for and are nonadult (nongeometric), and rely on notions of visibility and occlusion respectively. On an alternative, explanation, visibility and occlusion are simply pragmatic aspects of the meaning of and ; the profile of can be explained by the fact that occlusion is more noteworthy compared with visibility.

The influence of labels and facts on children's and adults' categorization.

Language has been assumed to influence categorization for both adults and children but the precise role and potency of linguistic labels in category formation remains open. Here we explore how linguistic labels help fit objects into categories when relevant perceptual information is either ambiguous or inconsistent with the labels. We also ask how the effects of labels compare to those of other types of information such as facts.

What does children's spatial language reveal about spatial concepts? Evidence from the use of containment expressions.

Children's overextensions of spatial language are often taken to reveal spatial biases. However, it is unclear whether extension patterns should be attributed to children's overly general spatial concepts or to a narrower notion of conceptual similarity allowing metaphor-like extensions. We describe a previously unnoticed extension of spatial expressions and use a novel method to determine its origins.