VISUAL DISCRIMINATION AND VERBAL COMPREHENSION OF SPATIAL RELATIONS BY YOUNG CHILDREN.

A comparison of the ability of young children to discriminate visually between different spatial relations in line drawings with their comprehension of the verbal instructions regarding the same relations was carried out. The subjects were 60 children between the ages of 4½ and 7½. The test material consisted of 27 cards. Each card had one or two lines and a circle drawn on it. The lines and the circle were drawn in different spatial relations to one another. The results show that the ability of children to discriminate visually the spatial relations between line drawings improves with increasing age. Similar improvement with age was found in their ability to comprehend verbal material describing the spatial relations of the same line drawings. Comparison between these two abilities indicates, however, that the visual discrimination of spatial relations is easier than the verbal comprehension of the same relations in all the age-groups tested. The results also show that there is no correlation between individual performances in the visual discrimination test and the verbal comprehension test. Some theoretical implications of the findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]