The interaction of language and thought in children's language acquisition: a crosslinguistic study

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to investigate the potential interaction of conceptual representations and linguistic systems in the process of language acquisition. Language–thought interactions were studied in 80 American, 48 Finnish and 48 Polish preschool children. The research focused on the conceptual and linguistic development of space and time. The spatial and temporal conceptual tasks were designed to measure the transition from experiential to inferential knowledge of space/time representations. In the linguistic domain, comprehension and production tests were used to evaluate the children's capacity to understand mono- and bi-referential location in space and time, where mono-referential location involves a single referent object/event with intrinsic properties (e.g. in/on or past/non-past), and bi-referential location requires two or more referent objects/events and relative perspective (e.g. deictic front/back or before/after). The conceptual and linguistic tests revealed significant changes during the period from two to five years of age, and measures of conceptual development were correlated with measures of linguistic development. As spatial and temporal representations became more structured, children were able to move from mono- to bi-referential location. In a comprehension test, we discovered an interaction of language by dimension. Finnish children found spatial distinctions relatively easy and Polish children found temporal distinctions relatively easy. This interaction was expected on the basis of the relative complexity of the morpho-syntactic coding in the spatial and temporal systems of the two languages. However, the argument relating the timing of acquisition to the transparency versus opacity of the linguistic systems was not supported by the English language comparison. Finally, the Finnish children were relatively better able to accomplish the spatial conceptual tasks as compared to the Polish children. This finding is consistent with a developmental concept of linguistic relativity. In general, the research indicates that spatial and temporal linguistic systems and representational knowledge interact during development with the influence occurring in both directions.

Does changing the reference frame affect infant categorization of the spatial relation BETWEEN?

“…The infant data correspond with a developmental trend that has been reported in the literature on the encoding of spatial location information during childhood, where young children can represent targets in relation to single referents or landmarks earlier than they can encode targets in relation to multiple referents that define a local spatial framework or region (Huttenlocher & Newcombe, 1984). The developmental progression observed in the infant spatial categorization and child location encoding studies is also consistent with spatial language acquisition data showing that monoreferential spatial terms (e.g., under) are comprehended by children earlier than bireferential spatial terms (e.g., between) (Johnston & Slobin, 1979;Weist, Lyytinen, Wysocka, & Atanassova, 1997). The combination of findings suggests that the order of acquisition of spatial relational concepts in preverbal infants foreshadows the processing of those concepts in children and the order of acquisition of the relevant words in children's spatial lexicon.…”

Language and perceptual categorisation

“…There is cross-lingual evidence to support the Whorfian hypothesis in the number domain 40 , in space 41,42 , time 43 and even speech perception 44 . There is also much evidence that language and cognition interact: children readily extend new words and assume words have a common referent.…”

Young children’s reasoning about the order of past events

“…The idea that there is a fundamental change between 3 and 5 years in children's temporal cognition is not a new one. In particular, there have been attempts to link changes in children's emerging competence with temporal relational terms with underlying cognitive changes (Cromer, 1971;Weist, 1986Weist, , 1989Weist, Lyytinen, Wysocka, & Atanassova, 1997;see Friedman, 1978). The studies described here provide additional evidence that 4-year-olds have difficulty with what has been termed temporalcausal reasoning.…”