Evolution of spatial decentration and language comprehension among young children.
Résumé
This study focuses on the link between Spatial Perspective taking (SPT) and receptive langage in children between 4 to 7 years. SPT corresponds to the ability to differentiate one's own point of view from that of another observer and then to represent the point of view of this other observer in a “visual scene” (Beaudichon & Bideaud, 1979). From 3 to 4 years children are able to judge whether an object would be seen or not by adopting another point of view (Sodian, Thoermer & Metz, 2007). We question the link between the understanding of basic concepts in children and theirs results in a task assessing SPT. Despite, the development of SPT does not require mastery of verbal skills (Greenberg, Bellana & Bialystok, 2013), the child must nevertheless understand the instructions presented. However, it is between 3 and 5 years that the understanding of basic language is acquired (Miljkovitch, Morange-Majoux & Sander, 2017). We examine the performance of decentration between 4 and 6 years while considering the understanding of the concepts. Our prédictions : spatial judgments errors decrease as participants get older, we expect a decrease of errors in children wih a high score in the test of language.
participants: 60 children (4 to 7 years). Material: Boehm Kindergarten to assess the development of receptive language and, the Animo-Déclic® game to assess the SPT, we used
For SPT, we note a significant decrease in the number of errors according to the age of the participants (Kruskal-Wallis Test (N = 60) = 34.62, p <0.001). Results show strong and negative links between understanding language basic concepts and errors in the SPT task (p <.001).
We show an improvement in SPT performance between the ages of 5 years and 6 years with a significant reduction in the number of errors at 6 years 11 months.