Spatial terms that encode support (e.g., “on”, in English) are among the first to be understood by children across languages (e.g., Bloom, 1973; Johnston & Slobin, 1979). Such terms apply to a wide variety of support configurations, including Support-From-Below (SFB; cup on table) and Mechanical Support, such as stamps on envelopes, coats on hooks, etc. Research has yet to delineate infants’ semantic space for the term “on” when considering its full range of usage. Do infants initially map “on” to a very broad, highly abstract category – one including cups on tables, stamps on envelopes, etc.? Or do infants begin with a much more restricted interpretation - mapping “on” to certain configurations over others? Much infant cognition research suggests that SFB is an event category that infants learn about early - by five months of age (Baillargeon & DeJong, 2017) - raising the possibility that they may also begin by interpreting the word “on” as referring to configurations like cups on tables, rather than stamps on envelopes. Further, studies examining language production suggests that children and adults map the basic locative expression (BE on, in English) to SFB over Mechanical Support (Landau et al., 2016). We tested the hypothesis that this ‘privileging’ of SFB in early infant cognition and child and adult language also characterizes infants’ language comprehension. Using the Intermodal-Preferential-Looking-Paradigm in combination with infant eye-tracking, 20-month-olds were presented with two support configurations: SFB and Mechanical, Support-Via-Adhesion (henceforth, SVA). Infants preferentially mapped “is on” to SFB (rather than SVA) suggesting that infants differentiate between two quite different kinds of support configurations when mapping spatial language to these two configurations and more so, that SFB is privileged in early language understanding of the English spatial term “on”.

编码支持的空间术语（例如，英语中的“on”）是儿童最先被跨语言理解的术语之一（例如，Bloom，1973；Johnston & Slobin，1979）。这些术语适用于各种各样的支撑配置，包括从下方支撑（SFB；桌上的杯子）和机械支撑，例如信封上的邮票、挂钩上的外套等。研究尚未描绘婴儿的语义空间考虑到其全部使用范围时，术语“on”。婴儿最初是否“映射”到一个非常广泛、高度抽象的类别——包括桌子上的杯子、信封上的邮票等。? 还是婴儿开始时有更严格的解释——将“on”映射到某些配置而不是其他配置？许多婴儿认知研究表明，SFB 是婴儿在五个月大之前就知道的事件类别（Baillargeon 和 DeJong，2017 年），这提高了他们也可能通过将“on”一词解释为指诸如此类的配置来开始的可能性桌子上的杯子，而不是信封上的邮票。此外，检查语言生成的研究表明，儿童和成人绘制基本的位置表达（BE上，英文）到 SFB over Mechanical Support（Landau 等人，2016 年）。我们检验了以下假设，即 SFB 在早期婴儿认知以及儿童和成人语言中的这种“特权”也是婴儿语言理解的特征。使用多式联运优先观察范式与婴儿眼动追踪相结合，向 20 个月大的婴儿提供两种支持配置：SFB 和机械、通过粘附支持（以下简称 SVA）。婴儿优先将“开启”映射到 SFB（而不是 SVA），这表明婴儿在将空间语言映射到这两种配置时区分两种完全不同的支持配置，因此，SFB 在英语空间的早期语言理解中享有特权术语“在”。