Department of Psychology, SUNY College at Fredonia
The purpose of this research was to investigate the interaction of conceptual and linguistic variables in the acquisition of temporal and spatial reference in child language. The research was focused on configurational and conventional concepts of time and space. Configurational time/space refers to the arrangement of objects in space or events in time, and conventional time/space involves temporal and spatial measurement . Specifically, this study was designed to determine the sequence in the acquisition of configurational and conventional temporal and spatial reference.
Temporal reference. In the conceptual domain, previous research has shown that 2-year-old children (and younger) can construct representations of episodes with chronological structure (e.g., Bauer & Mandler, 1989). While 2-year-old children can construct representations which involve the arrangement of events in time, they are quite limited in their capacity or to perform mental operations on those representations. For example, Fivush and Mandler (1985) found that even a 5-year-old child has difficulty sequencing a set of events in the backward direction. Furthermore, 5-year-old children (but not 3-year-old children) utilize story structure to organize a narrative (Berman & Slobin, 1994). This means that the 5-year-old can employ an abstract structure to put constraints on the temporal arrangement of the events in a narrative. In the linguistic domain, considerable research has shown that 2-year-old children can understand and produce tense distinctions such as past versus future. These deictic tense distinctions require that the event in focus be related to speech time as a point of reference. Before children are 4-years of age, they can integrate a second reference point (i.e., reference time) into their temporal reference, e.g., they can contrast before / after and when / and then (see reviews by Harner, 1982 and Weist, 1986).
Spatial reference. In the conceptual domain, 3-year-old children (and younger) can construct spatial representations, but they can=t transform these representations nor are they able to obtain an abstract perspective on their representations. In one study by Hazen, Lockman, and Pick (1978), preschool children learned a path through an experimental Ahouse@. When their knowledge of the layout was tested, all of the children could reverse the learned path. However, the 5-year-olds but not the 3-/4-year-olds could build a coordinated model of the space which would reflect a Atop-down@ perspective. In the linguistic domain, 2-year-old children can comprehend and produce contrasts involving spatial locatives such as in / on or into / out of. These functional morphemes establish a relationship between a primary object and a single referent object. By about 4 years of age, children control more complex spatial locatives which require either multiple referents, e.g., between, or complex spatial geometries, e.g., across / along (see Johnston, 1988 and Talmy, 1983). Hence, on both the temporal and spatial dimensions, there are conceptual and linguistic innovations which occur between 3 and 5 years of age.
Conventional time & space. There has been relatively little research on conventional time/space in the conceptual or the linguistic domain. Regarding the temporal dimension, Griffin, Case, and Sandieson (1992) conducted a particularly relevant study in the conceptual domain. They determined that 1) 4-year-olds have a relatively global sense of time allowing them to understand events having relatively short from long durations (e.g., minutes versus days), 2) 6-year-olds can seriate elements within a single dimension, e.g., 4PM is after 2PM, and 3) 8-year-olds can coordinate two dimensions such as hours and minutes. Hence, there should be a systematic change in the child=s capacity to comprehend conventional time notions during the period from 4;0 to 8:0.
From prior research on configurational time/space, we know that simple (or single-referent) temporal/spatial reference is acquired near the beginning of the preschool period and complex (or multiple-referent) temporal/spatial reference is acquired near the end of the preschool period (e.g., Weist, Lyytinen, Wysocka, & Atanassova, 1997). In this research, we expect to replicate this finding, and then go on to show the configurational time/space concepts are acquired prior to conventional ones.
Method
Results & Discussion
References
Berman, R.A. & Slobin, D.I. (1994). Relating events in narrative: a crosslinguistic developmental study. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Fivush, R. & Mandler, J.M. (1985). Developmental changes in the understanding of temporal sequence. Child Development 56, 1437-46.
Griffin, S., Case, R., & Sandieson, R. (1992). Synchrony and Asynchrony in the acquisition of children=s every day mathematical knowledge. In R. Chase (ed.) The Mind=s Staircase. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Hazen, N.L., Lockman, J.J. & Pick, H.L., Jr. (1978). The development of children=s representation of large-scale environments. Child Development 49, 623-36.
Johnston, J.R. (1988). Children=s verbal representation of spatial location. In J. Stiles-Davies, M. Kritchevsky & U. Bellugi (eds), Spatial cognition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Talmy, L. (1983). How language structures space. In H. Pick & L. Acredolo (eds), Spatial orientation. New York: Plenum.
Weist, R.M. (1986). Tense and aspect. In P. Fletcher & M. Garman (eds), Language acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Weist, R.M., Lyytinen, P, Wysocka, J., & Atanassova, M. (1997). The interaction of language and thought in children=s language acquisition: a crosslinguistic study. Child Language 24, 81-121.
Currently, the experimental design includes 37 children in the following age categories: 1) fourteen 4-year-olds (M = 4;3), 2) thirteen 6-year-olds (M = 6;9), and 3) ten 8-year-olds (M = 8:6). The research design was a mixed design with Age between subjects and the Complexity of the problems (i.e., simple, complex, & conventional) and the Dimension (i.e., time & space) within subjects. We used a sentence-picture matching task to collect the data. The procedure was as follows: 1) the experimenter (E) showed the child two alternative pictures (see Figure 1), 2) E read two sentences (see Appendix 1), and 3) the child was asked to point to the picture that corresponded with the target sentence. For example: A In one picture, the chipmunk is running North, and in the other picture, the chipmunk is running South. Which picture shows, the chipmunk is running North?@ The test sentences were counterbalanced, and therefore, there were two forms of the test each having 36 problems.
Table 1 contains a summary of the results. The analysis of variance indicated the following: 1) the main effect of Age was significant showing an obvious developmental trend, i.e., F (4, 68) = 6.16, p < .001, 2) the order of difficulty progressed from the simple to the complex configurational problems and then to the most difficult conventional problems, i.e., F(2, 68) = 51.8, p < .001, and 3) there was no significant difference between the temporal (M = 83 %) and the spatial (M = 84 %) problems, i.e., F (1, 34) = .32, p <1. There was a significant interaction of Age X Complexity, i.e., . F(4, 68) = 6.16, p < .001. Assuming 75 % to be above chance, Table 1 shows the following pattern: 1) the 4-year-olds passed only the simple problems, 2) the 6-year-olds passed all the configurational problems, and 3) the 8-year-olds passed all three types of problems. This pattern demonstrates the predicted developmental sequence, and it underlines the importance of language / thought interaction in the acquisition process.
Bauer, P.J. & Mandler, J.M. (1989). One thing follows another: effects of temporal structure on one- to two-years-olds= recall of events. Developmental Psychology 25, 197-206.