Language, Space, and Hypothetical Reasoning in Children's Acquisition of Temporal Concepts

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Time is perhaps the single most fundamental component of human experience, imbuing every thought and action. Despite its ubiquity in cognition - or perhaps because of it - time is difficult to conceptualize, and humans often draw on adjacent capacities, like language and spatial cognition, to reason about time. In this talk, Barner will present work on how preschoolers learn to conceptualize and talk about the past and the future, about temporal sequences, and about temporal processes like aging. In particular, Barner will argue that language provides a rich system of placeholder structures - e.g., words and statements that children hear and store - that form the basis for constructing temporal concepts, and that whereas language plays a central role, perceptual representations of time and space play a much smaller role, and are learned very gradually, and late in development. To show this Barner will discuss the case of duration words like "minute", "hour", and "day", as well as deictic expressions of past and future like "yesterday" and "tomorrow". Finally, Barner will discuss new data describing how children come to understand chronological age, starting with social categories like "baby" and "adult" that lack chronological content, and using linguistic understanding of numbers and duration words like "year" to build a temporal understanding later in development.

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