The Development of Natural Language Concepts

Category typicality, cultural familiarity, and the development of category knowledge.

“…Important for the purposes of the present study, however, is the general finding that children incorporate more typical instances into their category structures prior to atypical ones (Anglin, 1977;Bjorklund, Thompson, & Ornstein, 1983;Rosch, 1975a;Saltz, Soller, & Sigel, 1976;White, 1982). Furthermore, children's prototypicality gradients seem to be structured somewhat differently from those of adults, as indicated by their cate-gory typicality judgments , by priming effects from the category term (Duncan & Kellas, 1978), and by the increased tendency of children to use categorical relations for recall when child-defined typical items are used .…”

Development of the formation of categories by normal and retarded persons.

“…However, when subjects are cued, the discreteness of the superordinates may affect the categories into which items are placed. Saltz et al (1972) supplied six discrete superordinates to their kindergarten, third-, and sixth-grade children. As age increased the number of items placed in each category also increased.…”

“…More items were placed in things to wear by her oldest group. Neimark concluded that Saltz et al (1972) were incorrect in their assessment of integration of concepts and that concepts become fragmented and more definitive with age.…”

Development of Category‐Based Induction and Semantic Knowledge

“…Multidimensional scaling (MDS) studies suggest that the structure of semantic similarity space may change with development, such that saliency of perceptual features decreases and saliency of more abstract (i.e., not directly observable) features increases (e.g., Howard & Howard, ; Saltz, Seller, & Sigel, ). For example, in one study participants (6‐, 8‐, 11‐year‐olds, and adults) were given unpainted wooden blocks representing 10 different mammals (e.g., dog, mouse, cow, etc.…”