The focus of this work was on the relation between grammatical gender and categorization. In one set of studies, monolingual English-, Spanish-, French-, and German-speaking children and adults assigned male and female voices to inanimate objects. Results from Spanish and French speakers indicated effects of grammatical gender on classification; results from German speakers did not. A connectionist model simulated the contradicting findings. The connectionist networks were also used to investigate which aspect of grammatical gender was responsible for the different pattern of findings. The predictions from the connectionist simulations were supported by the results from an artificial language-learning task. The results from this work demonstrate how connectionist networks can be used to identify the differences between languages that affect categorization.
The ability to generalize verbs to new examples of previously labelled
events demonstrates an implicit understanding that verbs are representative
symbols of categories of events. The present study examined
when and how very young children generalize familiar verbs to novel
events by using the preferential looking paradigm. Overall, 24 children
aged 1;8 and 25 children aged 2;2 demonstrated their understanding of
the verbs kick and pick-up by looking significantly longer at the target
events on control trials. Additionally, children aged 1;8 with the largest
expressive vocabulary generalized the same verbs to actions with
different agents, but not to actions differing in outcome or manner of
action. In contrast, children aged 2;2 consistently extended familiar
action verbs to other actions differing in agent or manner, regardless of
the size of their expressive vocabulary. These findings were not due to
the saliency of any of the actions used and are interpreted in terms
of representational change consistent with the acquisition of lexical
learning principles.
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