The acquisition of Swedish prepositions : A longitudinal study of child comprehension and production of spatial prepositions

Abstract: Prepositions are acquired at earliest during the second year of life. This thesis investigates 16 children acquiring Swedish spatial prepositions, i.e. på ‘on/at’, i ‘in/at’, under ‘under’, bredvid ‘beside/next to’, bakom ‘behind/back’ and framför ‘in front’. This thesis aimed toinvestigate how preposition acquisition relates to language acquisition. The thesis used three different methods: eight sessions of free parent-child interaction, one structured experiment at 2;9 years and parental reports on child passive/active vocabulary from when the children were 0;9 years until they were 3;0 years old. The data gathered was correlated to scores in the parental reports at 4;0 years, which was used as a measure of communicative level, and used as a base when dividing the children into three groups: lower, average and higher score. The results showed that both parental and child preposition production, comprehension at 2;9 years, and comprehension and production predicted communicative level at 4;0 years. The results of the thesis varied depending on the method used. This highlights the importance if using several methods when investigating child language acquisition.