Earlier studies have found that 15-21-month-old children often develop particular non-linguistic problem-solving abilities at about the same time that they develop words that embody the concepts to which those abilities are relevant. Later in life, in school, for example, the words children know clearly influence the kinds of problems they can solve. This research will explore whether language can influence cognition in the same fashion even at this very early age? It turns out that different languages emphasize some types of concepts more clearly and saliently than others. For instance, Korean and Japanese place less emphasis on nouns than English does and more on verbs. Children learning Korean and Japanese typically learn verb morphology, the way in which verbs change their form to reflect tense, person, and the like, earlier than English-speakers, but they use fewer nouns. This learning clearly reflects the frequency of these kinds of words in the language they hear. Does this difference in linguistic input also affect the development of non-linguistic cognitive abilities? The research will involve testing Korean- and Japanese-speaking children longitudinally and cross-sectionally and will compare their linguistic and cognitive development to that of English speakers. The children will receive two types of tasks. The first kind, tool-use tasks, measure children's ability to understand actions and the relations between means and ends; these concepts typically are embodied by verbs. The second is sorting tasks, which measure children's ability to understand object categories; these concepts are typically embodied by nouns. The children's early words will also be recorded. If there is a tight correlation between the development of linguistic abilities and non-linguistic problem-solving abilities at this early age, then non-linguistic abilities related to verbs, such as tool use, will develop earlier in the Korean and Japanese speakers, while abilities related to nouns, such as object sorting, will develop earlier in the English speakers. This research potentially has great relevance to early-childhood education. Children are increasingly entering school from environments in which a language other than English is the predominant if not exclusive medium of communication. The results of this line of research should help preschools to deal with these normal children whose pattern of developed abilities would not be the same as that of children from monolingual English-speaking environments.
