The development of PATHS: Spatial complexity and the multiple predicate strategy

Elicited production data from English, French and Japanese children reveal that predicates of ‘traversal’ (e.g. across, through) present a particular lexicalization difficulty in the early stages of acquisition, regardless of expression in verbs or adpositions. Adult-like lexicalization patterns are consistently produced only by 6 or 7 years old. In all three languages, children circumvent the problem in the same way: by linguistically splitting such trajectories into subevents. This unexpected finding remains in need of more targeted investigation, but two possible accounts are considered. That these predicates are set apart due to elaborate lexical semantic structures is shown to be in contradiction with recent generative analyses. A more plausible account is offered in terms of relative complexity in the integration of non-linguistic spatial representations.