Object permanence and relational words: a lexical training study

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Abstract
Observational/correlational research has established that children in stage 5 object permanence development use words that refer to the visible movement of objects, while it is not until stage 6 that they use words referring to the invisible movement of objects (e.g. gone). It is not clear, however, whether the cognitive competence evidenced by performance in the object permanence task is a prerequisite for these linguistic productions or whether they both emerge simultaneously from some underlying representation. The current study used a lexical training paradigm to teach object words, visible movement words, and invisible movement words to children at stage 5 and stage 6 object permanence development. Stage 6 children learned all three types of words equally well. Stage 5 children learned object and visible movement words, especially in comprehension, but did not learn the invisible movement word. These results indicate that the cognitive structures underlying performance in the object permanence task are genuine prerequisites for learning these types of words.