Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Language has the power to shape the way people organize their thoughts and concepts. Some concepts, like spatialwords, are categorized differently cross-linguistically. Conflicting language-to-concept mappings, such as the Spanishen translating to both in and on, may pose difficulty to Spanish speakers learning English. This study investigated howcontextual cues can help children learn prepositions. Three-year-olds were read preposition books that were arranged inone of two conditions: separation or control. The separation condition had each instance of in appear in one visual context(e.g., Bear put the apple in the box, blue page) and each instance of on appear in a separate context (e.g., Penguin put theball on the grass, green page). The control condition eliminated the contextual cues by presenting instances of in and onin both contexts. This study informs our understanding of strategies to improve the learning of spatial words in everydayadult-child interactions.