Children in a wonderland: How language and scale errors may be linked

Abstract

Previous research showed that young children sometimes fail to use information about object size and make a serious attempt to perform impossible actions on miniature objects. Such scale errors have been hypothesized to result from immaturity in the interaction of the two visual streams, namely the visual stream for action and the visual stream for perception, coupled to a lack of inhibitory control in children. Here we propose that such dissociation in the action-perception system may be influenced by the developing language skills and report new evidence showing that children in a particular period of their language development are more prone to show scale errors. The results showed that the total number of nouns, but not adjectives in children's productive vocabulary seems to be an important factor for predicting scale errors. We argue that realising a model of scale errors is essential for understanding the relationship between language, object representation and motor system, and especially their interaction during development.