Both cognitive and educational psychology literature strive to investigate human category and concept learning. However, both literatures focus on different phenomena and often use different methodologies. We identify and discuss commonalities and differences between the literatures. This literature comparison reveals that research on relational category learning offers a promising avenue to integration. We suggest that this integration would be especially beneficial to advance our understanding of conceptual change essentially, how complex scientific concepts and categories are acquired and developed in educational contexts elaborating or correcting students' prior conceptions. Furthermore, the focus on relational categories allows us to provide an integrative discussion on how recent lines of research on analogy, memory and category learning, and knowledge restructuring relate to and can inform education. In general, this article advocates the complementary nature of cognitive and educational psychology and identifies viable, and potentially synergistic paths for future research. (PsycINFO Database Record

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Grammatical gender is independent of biological sex for the majority of animal names (e.g., any giraffe, be it male or female, is grammatically treated as feminine). However, there is apparent semantic motivation for grammatical gender classes, especially in mapping human terms to gender. This research investigated whether this motivation affects deductive inference in native German speakers. We compared German with Japanese speakers (a language without grammatical gender) when making inferences about sex-specific biological properties. We found that German speakers tended to erroneously draw inferences when the sex in the premise and grammatical gender of the target animal agreed. An over-generalization of the grammar-semantics mapping was found even when the sex of the target was explicitly indicated. However, these effects occurred only when gender-marking articles accompanied the nouns. These results suggest that German speakers project sex-specific biological properties onto gender-marking articles but not onto conceptual representations of animals per se.