Movement and location in the acquisition of deictic verbs

Samples of spontaneous speech from seven two-year-olds were scanned for utterances containing the verbs go and come. Their distribution was extensive, and included many non-motional uses. No clear case of the wrong use of either verb was found and the children seemed to have a basis for discrimination. As verbs of motion, they were used in the context of describing the contour of movement rather than as means of relating end-points of a journey. This relation between systems of movement and location was taken to be crucial in explaining the child's long-standing difficulty in discriminating the verbs in experimental tasks.