The Development And Mechanism Of Verbal Update Of Young Children

Generally,Human gets knowledge through direct or indirect experience.Children as young as 2-year-old have already put the feature of objects into the mental representation and keep in memory through direct experience(Saylor,2004).As they mature,the effect of direct experience becomes less and the usage of indirect experience counts more.Then,most of knowledge is concluded in our cognitive system as a way of 'being told',which is referred as'testimony' by Harris(2002).When talking about an absent object with children,they try to search it by themselves(Genea&Saylor,2013a),which proves that their understanding of objects is developing.Using behavioral experiment and basic questionnaire,the current study examined children's ability of verbal update,and their relation with executive function.Study 1 explored children's development of verbal update towards two kinds of information.Experiment 1 paid attention to young children's verbal update of property,which tested subjects of 56(age range from 19.5 to 35.5-month-olds).Experiment 2 investigated young children's verbal update of location,which tested 59 subjects(age range from 21.0 to 36.0-month-olds).Study 2 examined the factors that had influence on the individual difference of verbal update,which evaluated young(N=95,range 18.4-38.4)children's ability of verbal update,inhibitory control,working memory and language.Results:1)33-month-olds successfully updated their knowledge of the object's property on the basis of language,and 34-month-olds could update the mental representation of location.2)The children of same age from China and Canada performed distinctly on verbal update.Chinese children may develop later than Canadian's on the updating of objects'location,and the age gap lay on 4 months.3)The ability of verbal update varies between age and language,but the vital factor causing the individual difference of verbal update is inhibitory control component of executive function.The higher Children scored on IC tasks,the better their ability to update representation would be.To sum up,our research proves that by the end of 3 years old is the critical period for children to develop mental representation by taking advantage of language experience.Meanwhile,the ability of inhibitory control makes great contribution to it.These results lay the foundation for promoting children's knowledge learning by using words.The paper also discusses the cultural influences on the verbal update of Chinese children.