Children's ability to bind and maintain colour–location conjunctions: the effect of spatial language cues

Abstract

Sixty 4-year-olds were shown a target square, divided in half by colour, and, after a one second delay, were asked to find an identical square in a test array. Seven to ten days later, control children (N=19) completed the same task again, one experimental group heard a descriptive spatial language cue when shown the target (e.g. "yellow is on the top") (N=21) and the other heard and verbalized the same cue (N=18). Spatial language cues significantly improved the performance of both experimental groups when compared to the control group, but this was dependent on children demonstrating knowledge of the spatial language terms used. Verbalizing a linguistic cue yielded no additional benefit over just hearing a linguistic cue. The current results suggest that hearing a spatial language cue encourages children who have an understanding of spatial language terms to change from a visual to a verbal strategy to encode colour-location feature conjunctions in visual stimuli. SPATIAL LANGUAGE CUES AND FEATURE CONJUNCTIONS 3 Children's ability to bind and maintain colour-location conjunctions: the effect of spatial language cues

Impaired Spatial Category Representations in Williams Syndrome; an Investigation of the Mechanistic Contributions of Non-verbal Cognition and Spatial Language Performance

“…Note that spatial language only accounted for a small amount of variance in odd-one-out task performance (23% for the TD group and a non-significant 15% for the WS group) relative to the percentage of variance accounted for by non-verbal (RCPM) ability (31% for the TD group and 48% for the WS group) so it is unlikely that the groups were reliant on spatial language to complete the task, particularly as participants did not have all of the spatial language terms available to them (Farran and O’Leary, 2016). Rather, it suggests that spatial language could be used as a facilitator if available.…”

Speech and Gesture Production Provide Unique Insights Into Young Children’s Spatial Reasoning

“…There is a need for further research to differentiate among these perspectives and elucidate the processes underlying developmental change. However, to date few studies on spatial language examined children’s speech use within spatial tasks (Farran & O’Leary, 2016; Miller et al, 2016; Nardini et al, 2006), with none focusing on questions of relevance; few studies assessed nonverbal processes as it relates to their speech production such as nonverbal attention (Miller & Simmering, 2018), and to our knowledge, no studies have done both. We turn to gesture analysis to fill this gap.…”

Children’s attention to task-relevant information accounts for relations between language and spatial cognition

“…However, young children may know task-relevant words (as in the “prettier” example above) but not use them within the task. Farran and O’Leary (2016) tested children in the feature binding task (described above) first in a baseline condition (no language provided), then with language provided by an experimenter. Only children with knowledge of particular spatial terms (e.g., “left” and “right”) improved when an experimenter provided the terms.…”

“…When children are provided with language cues by an adult, the language can direct their attention to improve their spatial performance (e.g., Dessalegn & Landau, 2008). However when children are on their own, they need to attend to the relevant information to use language in relevant ways as children do not spontaneously use their language knowledge to enhance their spatial performance (Farran & O’Leary, 2016; Miller et al, 2017).…”