3.3. Acquisition Studies

3.3.1. Lack of data

Although according to Slobin (1997) there is almost no data about how young children and parents talk about motion in different types of languages, preliminary results from studies by Slobin and his research associates in several countries seem to indicate that the typological differences observed in the case of the novels and elicited narratives are also evident in the conversations between pre-school children and their parents. For example, English-speaking children (2 and 3 year-olds) have already acquired a large number of manner verbs such as run, hop, jump, skip, slide, and crawl. By contrast, Spanish speaking children have almost no such verbs at that age. This finding is in agreement with what was observed from the stories by 3 year-olds analyzed in the previous section. On the other hand, while children acquiring Germanic languages manage to produce elaborate path descriptions, such as, for instance, take the doll out over the top of the crib, children speaking Romance languages use single path verbs with sentences like the equivalents of remove the doll (see Max-Planck-Institute 1997).