The Role of Language in Temporal Cognition in 6- to 10-Year-Old Children

ABSTRACT

The ability to recognize temporal patterns and position events in time emerges during the preschool years and is refined in middle childhood. This study explored individual differences in temporal cognition in relation to verbal and nonverbal abilities. Children (30 boys, 32 girls; M_age = 8;2, age range = 6;0−10;8) completed 3 temporal-cognition tasks measuring estimation of temporal distance (how far events are from the present), knowledge of conventional times of events (specific days or months of events), and flexibility in using the calendar system (arranging nonconsecutive months in order), along with assessments of nonverbal intelligence, verbal short-term memory, visual-spatial working memory, receptive vocabulary, receptive grammar, and reading mastery. Controlling for age, performance across temporal-cognition tasks correlated with language abilities; nonverbal abilities accounted for little to no additional variance. The findings link language skills with the acquisition of conventional time patterns; such patterns developed alongside the ability to gauge distances of events in the past or future and form an organized timeline.

Acknowledgments

The research was presented at the 2017 Biennial Conference of the Society for Research in Child Development in Austin, TX. We thank Rita Obeid, Alexandria Garzone, Fabienne Geara, Jocelyn Philip, and Yan Mei Nie for assisting with data collection and scoring.

Notes

¹ Range-transformed scores were calculated using the formula: Transformed Placements = [(Original Placement – Minimum Value) × 24 / Observed Range] + 1. For example, a placement of 6 for a child using the range of 1 to 10 would yield a new placement score of 14 ([(6 – 1) × 24 / 9] + 1 = 14).

Additional information

Funding

The first author received funding through a Dissertation Grant from Language Learning: A Journal of Research in Language Sciences and a Doctoral Student Research Grant from The Graduate Center, The City University of New York.