Slobin has extensively studied the organization of information about spatial relations and motion events by speakers of different languages, including both children and adults. He has argued that becoming a competent speaker of a language requires learning certain language-specific modes of thinking, which he dubbed "thinking for speaking". Slobin's "thinking for speaking" view can be described as a contemporary, moderate version of the
Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which claims that the language we learn shapes the way we perceive reality and think about it. This view is often contrasted with the "
language acquisition device" view of
Noam Chomsky and others, who think of language acquisition as a process largely independent of
learning and
cognitive development. Slobin is also known for his pioneering research on child language development, in which he has taken a crosslinguistic approach. One seminal study, conducted with
Thomas Bever, compared the acquisition of word order in children acquiring English, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, and Turkish. Results revealed that children's pattern of comprehension depends on the canonical patterns of the target language. == Other work ==