Abstract
JOHNSON, LUCIE R.; PERLMUTTER, MARION; and TRABASSO, TOM. The Leg Bone Is Connected to the Knee Bone: Children's Representation of Body Parts in Memory, Drawing, and Language. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1979, 50, 1192-1202. Children, 4-9 years in age, acted out recall of action-body-location pairs or recalled object-body-location pairs in 3 experiments. The first experiment removed some methodological confounds of a similar previous experiment by Foellinger and Trabasso; the second experiment eliminated visual sources of input; and the third experiment removed sources of external dimensions as referents, used verbal material exclusively, and varied the input and body-location orders systematically. 2 main findings, suggesting spatial representation of the body, were found in all 3 experiments: (1) hierarchical organization in recall by spatially proximal body locations with head and foot locations acting as focal points in this organization and (2) bow-shaped, serial position recall curves for body locations when plotted against the body as a linear, head-to-foot dimension with end-anchoring effects for the head and feet independent of the input order. In a series of secondary analyses of related published research studies, analogous end-anchoring effects were found for children's drawings of the body and for body-word frequencies by both children and adults. In addition, interword associations for body terms by adults reflect the contiguous spatial properties of the body. These data suggest that young children have an internal representation of the body which is spatial in nature and that this representation determines body-word frequency, semantics, and associative effects.
Published Version
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