A CROSS‐CULTURAL STUDY OF SYMBOLIC MEANING–DEVELOPMENTAL ASPECTS

Twenty three Israeli kindergarteners and sixteen Israeli college students were tested on a variant of the Semantic Differential Test developed by Guiora (1976) to test the hypothesis that young Israeli children, like adults, are not influenced by the prevalence of grammatical gender in the language but ascribe sexual meanings to the test words based on their assumed connotative values. The results bore out the original hypothesis, suggesting that whatever the cognitive processes are that underlie the development of the capacity to resolve seemingly conflicting information in favor of the more salient feature, e.g. meaning, they seem to be in place by the time the child reaches five years of age.