Development of mechanical spatial language of support: Insight from 3- to 6-year-old children’s explanations

The current study tested how 3- to 6-year-old children encode causal mechanisms in language for Mechanical Support events (e.g. a person adheres one to another object). Children were first introduced to two objects and were familiarized with their affordances (e.g., whether the objects adhered to a box or not), then asked “Why did that happen?” During two test phases, children then simultaneously viewed a pair of events that depicted consistent or inconsistent support (e.g., the object fell when it previously adhered or it adhered when it previously fell). Children were again asked, “Why did that happen?” Children’s use of causal explanations (e.g., "The toy is sticking to the box because there is glue") increased from 3- to 6-years of age, and the types of causal explanations that children used changed with age. These findings shed light on the developmental lag that has been reported in children’s acquisition of Mechanical Support Language, suggesting that conceptual changes in children’s causal representations may influence their Mechanical Support language acquisition.