Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

One important function of language is to name relations. Preschool children performed a simple mapping task with and without hearing spatial prepositions calling attention to key relations. Children at 44 months were successful only if they were in the language condition. By 49 months, children were competent on the task regardless of condition, although there were still benefits of language. These results suggests that relational language can therefore be an important tool for highlighting relational commonalities children may otherwise fail to use.