Leiden University Student Repository

Duba, Sandra (2023)

Language and Order: The performance of preliterate children on spatial-temporal ordering tasks

Bachelor thesis | Japanstudies (BA)

How do speakers of different languages think about time? Studies showed that people who speak different languages behave differently on spatial-temporal ordering tasks. However, these differences usually correlated with that languages writing direction. This study looks at whether it is language that causes different results or writing direction by recreating such a spatial-temporal ordering experiment with preliterate children from two different languages. Interestingly, the results in this experiment did not seems to point to either one of the possibilities. The children did not perform either uniform within a language group or completely random in both language groups. One thing that can be said is that the preliterate children did perform differently from adults is similar experiments, so the possible influence from a language’s writing system cannot be rules out, however, there might be more factors at play.

Linguistic relativity

Space

Time

Spatial-temporal ordering

Writing direction

Preliterate children

Author

Duba, Sandra

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Specialisation

Language and Linguistics

Supervisors

Yoshioka, K.

ECTS Credits

10

Language

en