ABSTRACT

We examine whether acquiring left/right language affects children’s ability to take a non-egocentric left-right perspective. In Experiment 1, we tested 10–13 year-old Tseltal (Mayan) and Spanish-speaking children from the same community on a task that required they retrieve a coin they previously saw hidden in one of four boxes to the left/right/front/back of a toy sheep after the entire array was rotated out of view. Their performance on the left/right boxes correlated positively with their comprehension and use of left-right language. In Experiment 2, we found that training Tseltal-speaking children to apply left-right lexical labels to represent the location of the coin improved performance, but improvement was more robust among a second group of children trained to use gestures instead.

 抽象的

我们研究了学习左/右语言是否会影响儿童采取非自我中心的左右视角的能力。在实验 1 中，我们对来自同一社区的 10-13 岁 Tseltal（玛雅）和讲西班牙语的儿童进行了一项测试，要求他们取回一枚他们之前看到的藏在左/右/前面四个盒子之一中的硬币/整个阵列旋转到视野之外后的玩具羊的背部。他们在左/右方框上的表现与他们对左右语言的理解和使用呈正相关。在实验 2 中，我们发现训练讲 Tseltal 语的儿童应用左右词汇标签来表示硬币的位置可以提高表现，但在第二组接受手势训练的儿童中，进步更为强劲。