Further, out of the 24 body parts, five body regions accounted for 89.1% of judgments in Hindi children with a threshold of 50% agreement or more: region 1: hand-verbs (62 verbs), region: mouth- verbs (7 verbs) region 3: leg-verbs (15 verbs) region 4: eye-verbs (4 verbs) region 5: ear-verbs (2 verbs), while 3 verbs belonged to multiple regions. The Hindi children provided 24 distinct body parts. The results indicate that out of the 21 body parts, six regions accounted for 94.8% of the judgments in Telugu children with a threshold at 50% agreement or more: region 1: hand-verbs (67 verbs), region 2: mouth-verbs (25 verbs) region 3: leg-verbs (15 verbs) region 4: eye-verbs (3 verbs) region 5: ear-verbs (2 verbs), region 6 head verb (1), while 8 verbs belonged to multiple regions. Overall the children relate verbs systematically to 6 body regions in Telugu and 5 body regions in Hindi. Subsequently, in a judgment task 42 five-year-old Telugu speakers from an elementary school in Hyderabad and 60 five-year-old Hindi speakers from an elementary schools in Aasawarpur and Delhi, schooled in English, were asked orally and individually in Telugu or Hindi: “What body part do you use when you _ (verb)?” The verbs examined for Hindi-speaking children come from the translation from English of 101-early verbs from the Bates-MacArthur Communicative Developmental Inventory (Fenson et al., 1994). The 121 early verbs examined for Telugu- speaking children come from 32 transcripts of the speech children hear and produce at home between the age of 15-36 months. Specifically, we wondered if 5-year-old children who are native speakers of two Indian languages, Telugu and Hindi, would be systematic and coherent in their judgments if asked to provide a body part for common verbs. To add to this evidence, the present study examined the cross-linguistic differences in perceiving the relation of verbs and body parts in children who are exposed to multilingual cultures. One method consists of asking for associations between verbs and body parts (see Maouene et al., 2006, 2008). The study of body parts and their actions is particularly useful way to study the origins of verb meanings: their cultural specifics, linguistic, cognitive, metaphoric, and embodied connections.
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