title: Cognitive effects of language on human navigation.
abstract: Language has been linked to spatial representation and behavior in humans, but the nature of this effect is debated. Here, we test whether simple verbal expressions improve 4-year-old children's performance in a disoriented search task in a small rectangular room with a single red landmark wall. Disoriented children's landmark-guided search for a hidden object was dramatically enhanced when the experimenter used certain verbal expressions to designate the landmark during the hiding event. Both a spatial expression ("I'm hiding the sticker at the red/white wall") and a non-spatial but task-relevant expression ("The red/white wall can help you get the sticker") enhanced children's search, relative to uncued controls. By contrast, a verbal expression that drew attention to the landmark in a task-irrelevant manner ("Look at this pretty red/white wall") produced no such enhancement. These findings provide further evidence that language changes spatial behavior in children and illuminate one mechanism through which language exerts its effect: by helping children understand the relevance of landmarks for encoding locations.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT 06459, United States. ashusterman@wesleyan.edu
authors.forename: Anna
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Shusterman
authors.forename: Sang
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Ah Lee
authors.forename: Elizabeth S
authors.initials: ES
authors.lastname: Spelke
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D013037:Spatial Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D013060:Speech / Q000502:physiology*