0000000000341473
AUTHOR
Marja Atanassova
Spatial and temporal systems in child language and thought: a cross-linguistic study
This research was designed to evaluate the interaction of conceptual and linguistic factors during the acquisition of the spatial and temporal systems of Polish, English and Finnish from 3 to 6 years of age. In the conceptual-spatial task, children reconstructed a layout from a 180-degree change in perspective, and in the conceptual-temporal task they arranged three picture cards in a sequence while telling a story. In the linguistic domain, there were two comprehension tests and one production test containing spatial and temporal contrasts requiring either a single or multiple referent object(s)/event(s). The main effects (i.e., age, dimension, complexity) were always significant. There w…
The interaction of language and thought in children's language acquisition: a crosslinguistic study
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-re…