Language unifies relational coding: The roles of label acquisition and accessibility in making flexible relational judgments.

Language is likely structuring spatial judgments, but how it achieves this is not clear. We examined the development of relative, spatial judgments across verbal and nonverbal tasks of and in children between the ages of 5 and 10 years. We found that the verbal ability to make judgments preceded verbal / judgments and all nonverbal judgments. We also found that only when the labels were - as opposed to only having been acquired - did children's nonverbal performance improve. Our findings further indicate that accessing the correct term was not needed for enhanced performance. The results suggest that accessing language unifies different instantiations of a relation into a single representation.