Is It In Or Is It On? The Influence of Geometry and Location Control on Children’s Descriptions of Containment and Support Events

Spatial language comprehension and production is affected not only by where objects are positioned in space but also by what those objects are and how they are interacting with each other over time. This chapter examines children's production of spatial expressions to describe scenes involving containment and support events which manipulate both the relative positions of objects in those scenes and the dynamics in the scenes. The latter manipulation was a test of whether children's production spatial expressions is influenced by what has been termed location control. The chapter shows that even the youngest age group of children (from 3–4) modified the spatial expressions they produced in response to the presence or absence of location control in the scenes described.