The Acquisition of Topological Relations in Indonesian

Many scholars have proposed concepts relevant to topological relations, e.g., Herskovits (1982), Levinson, Meira, and The Language and Cognition Group (2003). The objectives of the author's experimental investigations of Indonesian topological relations are to examine what concepts relevant to the relations and to point out factors affecting the acquisition of them. The author's experiment used scaling tasks for adult participants, and production and comprehension tasks for children participants. The results showed that the concept expectedness governs the use of Indonesian topological relations. The author further argues that both conceptual and linguistic concepts affect the acquisition of topological relations in Indonesian.