Poster #87 - The development of spatial language skills and their role in spatial and mathematical thinking in primary school children

• In Event: 2-163 - Poster Session 08
  In Poster Session: PS 08 Section - Education, Schooling

Integrative Statement

Introduction: Spatial language, the language of spatial concepts and relationships (e.g., “above”, “parallel”), requires grounding of spatial relations and their symbolic (linguistic) representations. Spatial language has been identified as a tool for improving spatial thinking in pre-school children (Pruden, Levine & Huttenlocher, 2011). Given the reported links between spatial and mathematical thinking (Mix et al., 2016), spatial language may also be influential in mathematics domains. However, due to a lack of suitable spatial language measures for older children (above 7 years), there is limited evidence exploring the development of spatial language, and its role in spatial and mathematics performance in middle childhood.

Hypotheses: By using a developmentally suitable measure, improvements in spatial language through development from 6 to 10 years were anticipated. It was proposed that spatial language would be a predictor of spatial thinking, particularly for tasks that can be solved using verbal coding of spatial relations. Spatial language was predicted to explain unique variation in symbolic mathematics skills, even after controlling for spatial and language ability.

Methods: This cross-sectional study included 155 children across 5 age groups (age 6,7,8,9 and 10 years respectively). Participants completed a battery of spatial, mathematical and language tasks. This included four spatial tasks based on Uttal at al.’s (2013) classification of spatial skills (a disembedding task, a mental rotation task, a spatial scaling task and a perspective taking task). Participants also completed mathematics tasks assessing mathematics achievement (the NFER Progress in Maths Test), non-symbolic and symbolic number skills. Language measures included a novel spatial language measure designed for use in this study (Figure 1), and the British Picture Vocabulary Scale as a measure of receptive vocabulary.

Results: We first demonstrated that this novel spatial language measure is sensitive to developmental progression from 6 to 10 years (Figure 2). We then determined that spatial language explains 5.8% -8.6% of the variation in spatial skills controlling for age and vocabulary ability (this was true for mental rotation, spatial scaling and perspective taking, but not disembedding). For mathematics, spatial language explained 7.7% and 3.6% of the variation in standardised mathematics performance, and 0-1000 number line estimation respectively, controlling for age, spatial and vocabulary ability. No role for spatial language was found for other blocks of number line estimation (0-10, 0-100), or dot comparison performance.

Conclusions: The findings suggest that spatial language is beneficial for both spatial and mathematical tasks where verbal coding of spatial relations is useful. For example, for spatial scaling tasks, verbal strategies can be used when mapping the position of a target between two differently sized spaces, e.g., “the target is on the left side of the map above the house landmark”. Additionally, as spatial language requires grounding of spatial relations and their linguistic representations, understanding how spatial language terms acquire meaning also offers novel insights into the grounding of quantity information with mathematical symbols in numerical cognition. The associational findings reported here suggest that spatial language training may improve both spatial and mathematical thinking.

Authors

• Katie A. Gilligan, UCL Institute of Education
  Presenting Author

• Alex Hodgkiss, UCL Institute of Education
  Non-Presenting Author

• Pari C Patel, University of Surrey
  Non-Presenting Author

• Emily K. Farran, University College London
  Non-Presenting Author