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…