1-048 - Understanding the Development of Spatial Language Use and Spatial Skills

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

This symposium presents research on spatial language acquisition and how spatial language affects spatial skills. Spatial reasoning is predictive of math and science performance and improving spatial language early in development is important for cultivating spatial reasoning. The papers investigate factors involved in promoting spatial language acquisition and proposes mechanisms by which spatial language improves spatial skills.

Paper 1 investigates scaffolding in facilitating children’s use of spatial language in direction-giving. Children who received scaffolding in the form of directive prompting incorporated between in their direction-giving more than children who received non-directive prompting or overheard conversations. Paper 2 examines the role of spatial language training in children’s ability to learn spatial relational patterns. Children who heard relational labels improved in attending to spatial relational patterns and resisting perceptual distractions. Paper 3 assesses how spatial word acquisition relates to spatial analogy skills and examines how simplifying a spatial analogies task enhances performance. The acquisition of locative terms predicted task performance and children performed better when the objects were simple shapes rather than line drawings of actual objects. Paper 4 investigates the quality of children’s spatial language in predicting spatial skills. Results showed that children’s ability to verbally disambiguate object locations predicted performance across diverse spatial tasks, while controlling for productive spatial vocabulary. These papers demonstrate that spatial language support is important for both acquiring spatial language and promoting spatial skills, and show that children’s self-production of spatial words and the quality of their word use is predictive of their spatial skills.

Sub Unit

• Cognitive Processes

Chair

• Hilary E. Miller, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Individual Presentations

• The Role of Scaffolding and Overhearing in Facilitating Young Children’s Use of Complex Spatial Terms - Presenting Author: Alycia M Hund, Illinois State University

• Spatial Labels Facilitate Pattern Learning and Analogical Reasoning - Presenting Author: Nina Simms, University of Chicago

• The Impact of Object Type and Spatial Vocabulary on the Spatial Analogies in Preschool Children - Presenting Author: Youjeong Park, Cornell University; Marianella Casasola, Cornell Univ

• Quality of Children’s Spatial Language Use Predicts Spatial Skills - Presenting Author: Hilary E. Miller, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Haley A Vlach, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Vanessa R. Simmering, University of Wisconsin, Madison