Search results for "Language and thought"
showing 4 items of 4 documents
Spatial and temporal systems in child language and thought: a cross-linguistic study
1999
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…
What Can Linguistics Do to Technology Design?
2021
Intelligent technologies have already revolutionized the economy, and they will continue to do so via autonomous, AI-based systems and artefacts. Artefacts can handle much more intellectually complicated tasks than was possible before. However, the technological transformation will set new demands for technology design and designers. Designing electromechanical technologies has been based on natural science, but intelligent technologies will extensively use knowledge of human research and information processing to create new artefacts. Intelligent information processing has so far been possible only for biological systems and especially for human minds. Therefore, their functions and behavi…
The interaction of language and thought in children's language acquisition: a crosslinguistic study
1997
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…
Knowledge Representation and Cognitive Skills in Problem Solving
2017
This paper offers a programmatic view on the study of cross-linguistic variation and its effects on human cognitive skills. Based on Linguistic Typology and its methodology to account for cross-linguistic differences (section 2), it will show how the presence or absence of certain grammatical categories enhances or inhibits specific skills in the domain of quantification (section 3). In its main part (section 4), it will show how to describe structural differences between the source and the target language in translation and how to find out if these differences affect the performance of students in knowledge assessment tests. For that purpose, it will compare the English and the Japanese ve…