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Does Language About Similarity Play A Role In Fostering Similarity Comparison In Children?, Seyda Özçalışkan, Susan Goldin-Meadow, Dedre Gentner, Carolyn Mylander

Psychology Faculty Publications

Commenting on perceptual similarities between objects stands out as an important linguistic achievement, one that may pave the way towards noticing and commenting on more abstract relational commonalities between objects. To explore whether having a conventional linguistic system is necessary for children to comment on different types of similarity comparisons, we observed four children who had not been exposed to usable linguistic input – deaf children whose hearing losses prevented them from learning spoken language and whose hearing parents had not exposed them to sign language. These children developed gesture systems that have language-like structure at many different levels. Here …