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Gesture Reduces Mapping Difficulties in the Development of Spatial Language Depending on the Complexity of Spatial
Ercenur Ünal1,2, Kevser Kırbaşoğlu2, Dilay Z Karadöller1,3
1Multimodal Language Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
Cognitive Science
|February 24, 2025
Summary
Children’s spatial language development is influenced by both cognitive abilities and mapping challenges. They increasingly use gestures over speech for complex spatial relations, indicating developmental and modality-specific difficulties.
Area of Science:
- Developmental psychology
- Linguistics
- Cognitive science
Background:
- Children acquire locative terms in a stable order, with simpler terms like 'in' and 'on' learned before complex ones like 'left' and 'right'.
- This acquisition order may reflect the cognitive complexity of spatial relations or difficulties in mapping linguistic terms to spatial meanings.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate cognitive and mapping difficulties in children's spatial language development.
- To compare how children and adults map spatial meanings onto speech versus co-speech gestures across varying spatial relation complexities.
Main Methods:
- Twenty-four 8-year-old children and 23 adults described four-picture displays depicting 'in-on', 'front-behind', or 'left-right' spatial relations.
- Researchers analyzed the use of speech and co-speech gestures to express these spatial relations, comparing children and adults.
Main Results:
- Children increasingly relied on gestures over speech to express more complex spatial relations.
- Adults consistently used speech to express spatial relations, regardless of complexity.
- Even considering both speech and gesture, children showed a lag compared to adults in expressing complex 'left-right' relations.
Conclusions:
- Cognitive development and modality-specific mapping difficulties interact in shaping spatial language acquisition.
- Children's spatial language development involves overcoming challenges in both understanding spatial concepts and linking them to linguistic or gestural forms.
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