Task variations and attention shifts in young children’s category learning

Abstract

Two studies examined the conditions under which 6-year-old children succeeded in discovering prototypical information within ill-defined categories for fictitious animals that had salient individuating properties. Following either incidental or intentional learning of a single category, children attended to both prototypical and instance-specific features when judging the category membership of new examples (Experiment 1). When the same category was contrasted with a similar category in a sorting-with-feedback procedure, children relied on prototypical features in categorisation despite the fact that instance-specific features dominated their recognition-memory judgements (Experiment 2). The results show young children to be capable of shifting their attention to different kinds of category attributes according to the conditions of category formation and the nature of the assessment task.

Semantics of the Transitive Construction: Prototype Effects and Developmental Comparisons

“…Since the introduction of the notion of a prototype into the categorization literature by Rosch and her colleagues (e.g., Mervis & Rosch, 1981; Rosch, 1983), the basic idea has been applied to a wide range of linguistic contexts, including lexical semantics (Lakoff, 1987); tense‐aspect marking (Andersen & Shirai, 1996; Shirai & Andersen, 1995); relative clauses (Diessel & Tomasello, 2005); questions with long‐distance dependencies (Dąbrowska, Rowland, & Theakston, 2009); subject auxiliary inversion (Goldberg, 2006; see also Lakoff & Brugman, 1987; Lambrecht, 1994); and the lexical reorganization that leads to semantic overgeneralization and recovery from overgeneralization, as modeled by an unsupervised neural network (Schyns, 1991). There is also cross‐linguistic evidence demonstrating the role of prototypicality in young children’s acquisition of linguistic constructions (see review by Ibbotson & Tomasello, 2009) as well as in non‐linguistic categories (Boswell & Green, 1982; Ford, 2003; Lasky, 1974). Here we use prototype theory in a novel way: to investigate the semantics of a linguistic construction at two different points in development.…”

“…There is also cross-linguistic evidence demonstrating the role of prototypicality in young children's acquisition of linguistic constructions (see review by Ibbotson & Tomasello, 2009) as well as in non-linguistic categories (Boswell & Green, 1982;Ford, 2003;Lasky, 1974). Here we use prototype theory in a novel way: to investigate the semantics of a linguistic construction at two different points in development.…”

Relaciones conceptuales: definición del constructo, bases neuroanatómicas y formas de evaluación/Conceptual relations: construct definition, neuroanatomical basis and ways of assessment

“…Los objetos de la misma categoría taxonómica usualmente comparten el nombre genérico (e.g. animales) (Ford, 2003) y tienen propiedades perceptivas y no perceptivas (e.g. enciclopédicas) similares.…”

Diferencias en la categorización de seres vivos y objetos Estudio en niños de edad escolar

“…Las categorías taxonómicas hacen referencia a constructos mentales que unifican dos o más objetos para que sean percibidos como la misma clase de cosa y subsumidos en una sola etiqueta clasificatoria (Ford, 2003). Los miembros de una categoría taxonómica comparten propiedades; e.g., las ballenas y los caballos comparten características importantes (como ser de sangre caliente y producir leche) y, por ende, pertenecen a la misma categoría taxonómica -MAMÍ-FEROS- (Estes et al, 2011).…”

“…Dicha perspectiva sugiere que los seres vivos pero no los objetos comparten propiedades esenciales (Gelman & Diesendruck, 1999;Gelman, 2009;Gutheil, Vera, & Keil, 1998;Heyman & Gelman, 2000;Keil, 1992;Simons & Keil, 1995). Así, los animales pero no los artefactos retienen cualidades que persisten a pesar de los cambios en su apariencia externa.…”