The effect of cognitive bias on children's early interpretations of locative commands

Abstract

This study examines the effect and the sources of nonlinguistic cognitive biases on children's early understanding of locative commands. Two- and three-year-old children incorrectly interpreted improbable commands by making them probable. These same children were frequently able to correctly interpret unbiased commands which contained the same prepositions as those which they misinterpreted in the improbable commands. For example: they correctly interpreted the unbiased sentence, “Put the penny on the baby,” but erred on “Put the box on the cowboy.” (They put the cowboy in the box.) The sources for their cognitively biased interpretations on the improbable commands were attributable to the perceptual features of the objects, the action schemes which children commonly use in relation to the objects, and the relative ease of motor response used to place one object in relation to another.