The current study explores whether individual differences in the dimensional adjectives (e.g., big, tall) children understand, relates to individual differences in two non-verbal spatial abilities, spatial scaling and mental transformations, in bilingual children. The inclusion of English–Spanish bilingual children broadens the work in this area which has previously focused strictly on English language. Ninety-two English–Spanish bilingual children between 37.65 and 71.87 months (42 male) participated in the study. Results show number of dimensional adjectives preschool children comprehend utilizing a new interactive, tablet-based task relates to performance on non-verbal spatial tasks. This research supports hypothesized relations between spatial language comprehension and spatial abilities, introduces an effective tool for examining spatial language comprehension in young children, and improves generalizability by including a bilingual sample and testing comprehension in both English and Spanish.

中文翻译：

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学龄前儿童空间思维的个体差异：维度形容词的理解及其与儿童非语言空间任务表现的关系


目前的研究探讨了双语儿童中儿童理解的维度形容词（例如，大、高）的个体差异是否与两种非语言空间能力（空间尺度和心理转变）的个体差异有关。英语-西班牙语双语儿童的纳入拓宽了该领域的工作范围，该领域以前严格专注于英语。 92 名 37.65 至 71.87 个月大的英语-西班牙语双语儿童（42 名男性）参与了这项研究。结果显示，学龄前儿童利用基于平板电脑的新交互式任务理解的维度形容词数量与非语言空间任务的表现有关。这项研究支持了空间语言理解和空间能力之间的假设关系，引入了一种检查幼儿空间语言理解的有效工具，并通过包含双语样本和测试英语和西班牙语的理解来提高普遍性。