Language and the latent structure of cognitive development (1)

A cross-cultural method was used to explore theoretical implications of the reported association between mastery of the comparative forms in language and development of competency in dealing with difference and equality relations (such as those of Piaget's conservation problems). Since Turkish allows comparisons to be made without the use of a morphologically distinct form (equivalent to: John is to Mary tall), it was selected for contrastive study along with English and Greek which share a similar system for comparisons. One hundred and ten English, Turkish-Cypriot and Greek-Cypriot children (age 4–11) attending school in London were tested on a variety of language, conservation, and multiple classification problems. The results of this testing indicated that language competency does play a significant role during the course of cognitive development, and that variations in language structure can engender parallel variations in the structure of development. Statistical analyses suggested the following specific conclusions: (1) the concrete operations stage is not functionally unified; (2) the structure of development during this stage is multidimensional; and (3) constancy across cultures in the ordering of development during this stage arises, in part, from similarities between their languages in the representation of attribute and difference relations.