Search

Do boys produce more terms than girls to describe the spatial world—that is, dimensional adjectives (e.g., big, little, tall, short), shape terms (e.g., circle, square), and words describing spatial features and properties (e.g., bent, curvy, edge)? If a sex difference in children’s spatial-language use exists, is it related to the spatial language that parents use when interacting with children? We longitudinally tracked the development of spatial-language production in children between the ages of 14 and 46 months in a diverse sample of 58 parent-child dyads interacting in their homes. Boys produced and heard more of these three categories of spatial words, which we call “what” spatial types (i.e., unique “what” spatial words), but not more of all other word types, than girls. Mediation analysis revealed that sex differences in children’s spatial talk at 34 to 46 months of age were fully mediated by parents’ earlier spatial-language use, when children were 14 to 26 months old, time points at which there was no sex difference in children’s spatial-language use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Acquiring verbs and prepositions requires categorization of spatial relations. This study examined whether a ground object differentially influences 13- to 15-month-old English-learning infants’ categorization of a figure’s path (e.g., around; Experiment 1) and manner (e.g., hopping; Experiment 2) of motion in non-linguistic dynamic realistic events. Furthermore, we tested whether categorizing path is “easier” than categorizing manner. Results revealed that infants categorized path only in the presence of a ground object, validating Talmy’s definition of path. In contrast, infants categorized manner only in the absence of a ground object. Finally, infants categorizing path showed stronger novelty preferences than those categorizing manner, supporting a primacy of path. Infants showed sensitivity to event components lexicalized in relational terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Action categorization is necessary for human cognition and is foundational to learning verbs, which label categories of actions and events. In two studies using a nonlinguistic preferential looking paradigm, 10- to 12-month-old English-learning infants were tested on their ability to discriminate and categorize a dynamic human manner of motion (i.e., way in which a figure moves; e.g., marching ). Study 1 results reveal that infants can discriminate a change in path and actor across instances of the same manner of motion. Study 2 results suggest that infants categorize the manner of motion for dynamic human events even under conditions in which other components of the event change, including the actor’s path and the actor. Together, these two studies extend prior research on infant action categorization of animated motion events by providing evidence that infants can categorize dynamic human actions, a skill foundational to the learning of motion verbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fundamental to amassing a lexicon of relational terms (i.e., verbs, prepositions) is the ability to abstract and categorize spatial relations such as a figure (e.g., boy) moving along a path (e.g., around the barn). Three studies examine how infants learn to categorize path over changes in manner, or how an action is performed (e.g., running vs. crawling). Experiment 1 ( n = 60) finds that 10- to 12-month-old English-learning infants categorize a figure's path. In Experiment 2 ( n = 27) categorization is disrupted when the ground object is removed, suggesting the relation between figure and ground defines the path. Experiment 3 ( n = 24) shows that language may be a mechanism guiding category formation. These studies suggest that English-learning infants can categorize path, a component lexicalized in the world's languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To learn motion verbs, infants must be sensitive to the specific event features lexicalized in their language. One event feature important for the acquisition of English motion verbs is the manner of motion. This article examines when and how infants detect manners of motion across variations in the figure's path. Experiment 1 shows that 13- to 15-month-olds ( N = 30) can detect an invariant manner of motion when the figure's path changes. Experiment 2 reveals that reducing the complexity of the events, by dampening the figure's path, helps 10- to 12-month-olds ( N = 19) detect the invariant manner. These findings suggest that: (a) infants notice event features lexicalized in English motion verbs, and (b) attention to manner can be promoted by reducing event complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine the relations between parent spatial language input, children's own production of spatial language, and children's later spatial abilities. Using a longitudinal study design, we coded the use of spatial language (i.e. words describing the spatial features and properties of objects; e.g. big, tall, circle, curvy, edge) from child age 14 to 46 months in a diverse sample of 52 parent-child dyads interacting in their home settings. These same children were given three non-verbal spatial tasks, items from a Spatial Transformation task (), the Block Design subtest from the WPPSI-III (), and items on the Spatial Analogies subtest from Primary Test of Cognitive Skills () at 54 months of age. We find that parents vary widely in the amount of spatial language they use with their children during everyday interactions. This variability in spatial language input, in turn, predicts the amount of spatial language children produce, controlling for overall parent language input. Furthermore, children who produce more spatial language are more likely to perform better on spatial problem solving tasks at a later age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A core task in language acquisition is mapping words onto objects, actions, and events. Two studies investigated how children learn to map novel labels onto novel objects. Study 1 investigated whether 10-month-olds use both perceptual and social cues to learn a word. Study 2, a control study, tested whether infants paired the label with a particular spatial location rather than to an object. Results show that 10-month-olds can learn new labels and do so by relying on the perceptual salience of an object instead of social cues provided by a speaker. This is in direct contrast to the way in which older children (12-, 18-, and 24-month-olds) learn and extend new object names. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individual differences in spatial thinking are predictive of children's math and science achievement and later entry into Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Little is known about whether parent characteristics predict individual differences in children's spatial thinking. This study aims to understand whether, and to what extent, mother's intrinsic (i.e., mental rotation) and extrinsic (i.e., spatial scaling) spatial ability directly and indirectly, via the variation in home spatial environment, predicts children's intrinsic and extrinsic spatial ability. A total of 165 mothers and their 4–6‐year‐old children were recruited to participate in a remote video session with an experimenter. Mothers were administered a forced‐choice Intrinsic Spatial Toy Preference Task gauging their preference for highly spatial versus less spatial toys and asked questions with the Home Intrinsic Spatial Environmental Questionnaire about the frequency with which they engage their child in spatial activities at home. Mothers completed a Mental Rotations Test and a Spatial Scaling Task adapted for adults. Children were administered the Picture Rotation Task, the Spatial Scaling Task, and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. Structural equation modeling was used to examine direct and indirect, via home spatial environment and toy choices, influences of mother spatial ability on child spatial ability. Contrary to our predictions, we did not find direct, nor indirect, relations between mother and child spatial ability. These findings suggest that researchers should consider alternative conceptualizations of the early home spatial environment beyond the frequency of spatial play in the home. Research Highlights: The identification of factors that predict individual differences in children's spatial ability is important in order to maximize STEM learning outcomes.Data collection was conducted remotely rather than in traditional preschool or laboratory settings.Contrary to our pre‐registered hypotheses, no significant relations between mother spatial ability, the early home spatial environment, and children's development of spatial skills were found.Future research should consider examining the amount of spatial language used in the home or the quality of parent–child interactions during spatial play as potential explanations for individual differences in children's spatial ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study explores whether individual differences in the dimensional adjectives (e.g., big, tall) children understand, relates to individual differences in two non‐verbal spatial abilities, spatial scaling and mental transformations, in bilingual children. The inclusion of English–Spanish bilingual children broadens the work in this area which has previously focused strictly on English language. Ninety‐two English–Spanish bilingual children between 37.65 and 71.87 months (42 male) participated in the study. Results show number of dimensional adjectives preschool children comprehend utilizing a new interactive, tablet‐based task relates to performance on non‐verbal spatial tasks. This research supports hypothesized relations between spatial language comprehension and spatial abilities, introduces an effective tool for examining spatial language comprehension in young children, and improves generalizability by including a bilingual sample and testing comprehension in both English and Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identifying factors that contribute to spatial thinking is of great interest given links between spatial thinking and success in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Working memory has been found to be predictive of spatial thinking but little research has explored other components of executive function (i.e., inhibition and shifting) in relation to spatial thinking. A total of 131 4‐ to 6‐year‐olds (Mage = 5.06; 53.4% male; 56% Latinx, 18% White, 12% Mixed Race, 5% Asian, and 5% other) were assessed using spatial, executive function, and intelligence tasks. Results show that inhibition, shifting, and working memory are all associated with intrinsic and extrinsic spatial task scores. These results advance developmental theory on spatial thinking and offer a promising route for future interventions in improving spatial ability. Highlights: In this study, we examine whether there are direct effects of executive function of children's spatial thinking.Four to six‐year‐old children were assessed using a battery of spatial, executive function, and general intelligence tasks. Results show that the three components of executive function are associated with both intrinsic and extrinsic spatial thinking.These findings advance developmental theory and provide a basis for future interventions to improve spatial thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The hippocampus is a subcortical structure in the medial temporal lobe involved in cognitive functions such as spatial navigation and reorientation, episodic memory, and associative learning. While much is understood about the role of hippocampal function in learning and memory in adults, less is known about the relations between the hippocampus and the development of these cognitive skills in young children due to the limitations of using standard methods (e.g., MRI) to examine brain structure and function in developing populations. This study used hippocampal‐dependent trace eyeblink conditioning (EBC) as a feasible approach to examine individual differences in hippocampal functioning as they relate to spatial reorientation and episodic memory performance in young children. Three‐ to six‐year‐old children (N = 50) completed tasks that measured EBC, spatial reorientation, and episodic memory, as well as non‐hippocampal‐dependent processing speed abilities. Results revealed that when age was held constant, individual differences in EBC performance were significantly related to individual differences in performance on the spatial reorientation test, but not on the episodic memory or processing speed tests. When the relations between hippocampal‐dependent EBC and different reorientation strategies were explored, it was found that individual differences in hippocampal function predicted the use of geometric information for reorienting in space as opposed to a combined strategy that uses both geometric information and salient visual cues. The utilization of eyeblink conditioning to examine hippocampal function in young populations and its implications for understanding the dissociation between spatial reorientation and episodic memory development are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Limited options exist to evaluate the development of hippocampal function in young children. Research has established that trace eyeblink conditioning (EBC) relies on a functional hippocampus. Hence, we set out to investigate whether trace EBC is linked to hippocampal structure, potentially serving as a valuable indicator of hippocampal development. Our study explored potential associations between individual differences in hippocampal volume and neurite density with trace EBC performance in young children. We used onset latency of conditioned responses(CR) and percentage of conditioned responses (% CR) as measures of hippocampal‐dependent associative learning. Using a sample of typically developing children aged 4 to 6 years (N = 30; 14 girls; M = 5.70 years), participants underwent T1‐ and diffusion‐weighted MRI scans and completed a 15‐min trace eyeblink conditioning task conducted outside the MRI. % CR and CRonset latency were calculated based on all trials involving tone‐puff presentations and tone‐alone trials. Findings revealed a connection between greater left hippocampal neurite density and delayed CR onset latency. Children with higher neurite density in the left hippocampus tended to blink closer to the onset of the unconditioned stimulus, indicating that structural variations in the hippocampus were associated with more precise timing of conditioned responses. No other relationships were observed between hippocampal volume, cerebellum volume or neurite density, hippocampal white matter connectivity and any EBC measures. Preliminary results suggest that trace EBC may serve as a straightforward yet innovative approach for studying hippocampal development in young children and populations with atypical development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated the extent to which parents' prosocial talk and negations relate to the quantity and diversity of parents' spatial language production. We also examined similar associations among children. Participants included 51 children of ages 4–7 years and their parents recruited from South Florida. Most of the dyads included mothers and were Hispanic and bilingual. Dyads constructed a Lego house for 10 min. Sessions were transcribed and coded for instances of parent prosocial talk (praises, reflective statements, and behavior descriptions), child general positive statements (all positive contributions to the interaction), and parent and child negations (criticisms, corrections, and disapprovals) using the Dyadic Parent–Child Interaction Coding System. Transcripts were also coded for quantity and diversity of spatial language including shape terms (e.g., square), dimensional adjectives (e.g., little), orientations (e.g., turn), locations (e.g., middle), and spatial features/properties (e.g., edge). Parents' prosocial language, but not negations, were significantly associated with the quantity and diversity of parents' spatial language. Children's general positive statements were significantly associated with children's spatial language quantity. Exploratory data analyses also revealed significant associations between parent–child talk about shapes, dimensions, and spatial features and properties. Findings suggest that variability in parent–child prosocial and spatial talk during collaborative spatial play relates to aspects of their own—and each other's—spatial language production. Public Significance Statement: The present study suggests that aspects of the parent–child social context are related to parents' and children's production of spatial talk (e.g., talk about shapes, dimensions, and locations), language that is relevant for entry and success in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields. This offers new perspectives and possible outcomes for parenting interventions that aim to improve the parent–child relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prosody, or the intonation contours of speech, conveys emotion and intention to the listener and provides infants with an early basis for detecting meaning in speech. Infant-directed speech (IDS) is characterized by exaggerated prosody, slower tempo, and elongated pauses, all amodal properties detectable across the face and voice. Although speech is an audiovisual event, it has been studied primarily as a unimodal auditory stream without the synchronized dynamic face of the speaker. According to the intersensory redundancy hypothesis, redundancy across the senses facilitates perceptual learning of amodal information, including prosody. We predicted that young infants who are still learning to discriminate and categorize prosodic information would detect prosodic changes better in the presence of intersensory redundancy (i.e., synchronous audiovisual speech) than in its absence (i.e., unimodal auditory or asynchronous audiovisual speech). To test this hypothesis, 72 4-month-old infants were habituated to recordings of women reciting passages in IDS with prosody conveying either approval or prohibition and then were tested with recordings of a novel passage with either a change or no change in prosody. Infants who received bimodal synchronous stimulation exhibited significant visual recovery to the novel passage with a change in prosody, but not to a novel passage with no change in prosody. Infants in the unimodal auditory and bimodal asynchronous conditions did not exhibit visual recovery in either condition. Results support the hypothesis that intersensory redundancy facilitates detection and abstraction of invariant prosody across changes in linguistic content and likely serves as an early foundation for the detection of meaning in fluent speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study examined the effect of Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT), a parent-training intervention for child behavior problems, on child language production. Participants were 46 children (ages 20–70 months) with externalizing behavior problems and with or at risk for developmental delay. Parent–child dyads were randomly assigned to a waitlist control or immediate treatment group. Parenting skills learned during PCIT (i.e., “do skills”) and children's word tokens and word types were measured at baseline and 4 months later. Findings suggest an indirect effect of parent do skills on the relation between group and child word types, such that more parent do skills predicted more child word types for families receiving PCIT. The present study found that mothers' use of child-directed skills played an important role in the growth and improvement of child language. Results suggest that parent-training interventions targeting child behavior problems may also foster child language production. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Spatial researchers have been arguing over the optimum cognitive strategy for spatial problem-solving for several decades. The current article aims to shift this debate from strategy dichotomies to strategy flexibility--a cognitive process, which although alluded to in spatial research, presents practical methodological challenges to empirical testing. In the current study, participants' eye movements were tracked during a mental rotation task (MRT) using the Tobii ×60 eye-tracker. Results of a latent profile analysis, combining different eye movement parameters, indicated two distinct eye-patterns--fixating and switching patterns. The switching eye-pattern was associated with high mental rotation performance. There were no sex differences in eye-patterns. To investigate strategy flexibility, we used a novel application of the changepoint detection algorithm on eye movement data. Strategy flexibility significantly predicted mental rotation performance. Male participants demonstrated higher strategy flexibility than did female participants. Our findings highlight the importance of strategy flexibility in spatial thinking and have implications for designing spatial training techniques. The novel approaches to analyzing eye movement data in the current paper can be extended to research beyond the spatial domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the world, the manners and paths of motion events take place together, but in language, these features are expressed separately. How do infants learn to process motion events in linguistically appropriate ways? Forty-six English-learning 7- to 9-month-olds were habituated to a motion event in which a character performed both a manner and a path, and then tested on events that changed the manner, path, both, or neither. Infants detected each type of change, but only the girls showed evidence of processing manner and path as independent features. This gender difference provides clues about the universal development of manner and path concepts from more basic perceptual skills. Results have implications for how representations of linguistically relevant semantic elements develop conceptually. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]