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. We used cross-linguistic data to test these two hypotheses. In Experiment 1, we examined the production and comprehension of by 3- and 4-year-old children and adults speaking two different languages (English and Greek). Children, unlike adults, used more frequently than in both languages; however, no such asymmetry surfaced in the comprehension of the two prepositions. In Experiment 2, both adults and children from the same language groups showed the asymmetry when describing a more variable battery of spatial stimuli. Our results support the pragmatic inference hypothesis. We conclude that the emergence of spatial terms does not solely index semantic development but may be linked to pragmatic factors that also shape adults' production of spatial language cross-linguistically. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).