Ways of speaking about space: The development of children's skill in communicating spatial knowledge
1989; Elsevier BV; Volume: 4; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1016/0885-2014(89)90011-7
ISSN1879-226X
Autores Tópico(s)Child and Animal Learning Development
ResumoThere are various ways in which children might be asked to demonstrate knowledge about space. We take the stance that the description of large-scale space is a communication task, incorporating skills in remembering and communicating spatial information. We present data on the development of children's use of a communicative convention (the “mental tour”) in describing spatial knowledge in a memory test. Thirty-two 6–7- and 8–9-year-old children explored a laboratory-constructed funhouse, guided by instructions to study the layout or the route, and then were asked to describe the funhouse, with encouragement to sketch the space as they talked. Older children's descriptions of the space contained information about the temporal and spatial contiguity of areas in the space, with performance resembling that reported for adults (Linde & Labov, 1975). Younger children who were oriented to the layout tended to list places without reference to spatial relations, but descriptions provided by younger children who were oriented to the route through the space did not differ from older children. It appears that with development children become increasingly skilled at pragmatic conventions such as the mental tour for organizing spatial descriptions, and that the utilization of this skill in the early years may be more likely when children are oriented to route information relevant to constructing a description in the form of a mental tour.
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