Développement du langage et de la cognition spatiale géocentrique

Abstract

According to Western psychology, the child constructs egocentric spatial concepts before developing geocentric concepts. In a cross-cultural study on 1 143 children aged 4 to 15, in Bali, Banaras, Katmandou, and Geneva, we find that the geocentric frame predominates even in very young children (4 to 6 years) and becomes stronger with age. Small-scale, table-top space is organised according to a large-scale spatial orientation system and this even indoors where no external spatial cues are available. Three language elicitation tasks and three spatial encoding tasks are used. A comparison with children studied in Geneva shows that we are facing a developmental path unknown in Western societies.