Individual differences in preschoolers’ spatial cognition: Role of spatial-relational language in predicting spatial thinking

• In Event: 3-029 - Process-based approaches to understanding spatial development: the role of attention, language, and gesture

Integrative Statement

Individual differences in spatial cognition (e.g., ability to locate hidden items using maps, recognize and rotate shapes/objects, manipulate and copy shapes and patterns) have consequences for mathematics achievement, early school readiness, and later STEM success. According to Pruden and colleagues (2011), one factor that explains individual differences in children’s spatial cognition is the amount of spatial-relational language (words about size, shape, and spatial features; big, little, circle, square, bent, curvy) children know and produce. What remains unclear is how specific spatial-relational word categories, such as dimensional adjectives, which require the child to understand the relation between two objects to show understanding of word, relate to individual differences across different types of non-verbal spatial tasks. Few measures of receptive spatial-relational language exist making it difficult to examine this relation. Thus, this study had three aims, to: (1) develop an easy-to-use, interactive, and valid measure of children’s dimensional adjective comprehension; (2) determine whether comprehension of dimensional adjectives is predictive of spatial scaling, a task that relies on comparing relative size and relational thinking, and; (3) show that knowledge of dimensional adjectives does not predict performance on all spatial tasks, but only predicts performance on tasks requiring relational thinking.

Participants included 92 bilingual English-Spanish preschool children, ranging in age from 37.65- to 71.87-months-old (M=58 months; 42 males; 82% Hispanic/Latino/Spanish). Children completed the following across two visits: (a) a new tablet-based interactive assessment of dimensional adjective comprehension in English and Spanish that tested children on 10 terms in each language (e.g., big, little, tall, short; grande, pequeño, alto, corto; see Figure 1 for sample item where child was asked, “Touch the short toy” or “Toca el juguete corto”). (b) a general receptive vocabulary measure in English (PPVT) and Spanish (TVIP), (c) the Spatial Scaling Task (SST; Frick & Newcombe, 2012), a measure assessing children’s ability to locate objects in a 2D spatial layout using information from a second spatial representation (map); and (d) the Children’s Mental Transformation Task (CMTT; Levine et al., 1999), an assessment of children’s ability to mentally rotate/transform objects.

To establish the validity of the new dimensional adjective language measure we compared performance on this task to children’s general receptive vocabulary. We found that the number of dimensional adjectives children comprehended was significantly correlated with children’s general receptive vocabulary within language (p’s = .009-0.014), but not across language (p’s=0.857-.917), suggesting our new measure was a valid measure of receptive language (Aim 1). Using multiple regression, we found, as hypothesized, that number of dimensional adjectives comprehended in English predicted individual differences on the SST (Aim 2; B=-4.971, p<.001; Table 1), but did not predict individual differences on the CMTT (Aim 3; B=.316, p=.277). Together these findings suggest that knowledge of a specific category of spatial-relational words, dimensional adjectives, predicts individual differences in spatial abilities requiring relational thinking, but not those abilities that do not require relational thought, such as mental rotation/transformation. We will discuss how these findings can be used to develop training/intervention studies aimed at improving spatial and relational thinking.

Authors

• Rosalie Odean, Florida International University
  Presenting Author

• Carla Abad, Florida International University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Shannon M Pruden, Florida International University
  Non-Presenting Author