Development of inductive generalization with familiar categories

Fisher, Anna V.; Godwin, Karrie E.; Matlen, Bryan J.

doi:10.3758/s13423-015-0816-5

Cited by 35 publications

(63 citation statements)

References 70 publications

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“…The words learned early by children are the ones that are common in speech to them (Goodman et al., ; Hart, ). The co‐occurrence of words, constrained by context and related meanings, builds conceptual networks of the semantic structure of language (Hills et al., ; Jones & Mewhort, ) and speeds the learning of new words when introduced in known contexts with known words (Fisher, Godwin, & Matlen, ; Hills, Maouene, Maouene, Sheya, & Smith, ). The contextual diversity of individual words (e.g., Adelman, Brown, & Quesada, ; Hills et al., ; see Jones, Dye, & Johns, for a review) predicts both age of acquisition and the speed of adult judgments in lexical processing tasks.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantity and Diversity: Simulating Early Word Learning Environments

2018

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The words in children's language learning environments are strongly predictive of cognitive development and school achievement. But how do we measure language environments and do so at the scale of the many words that children hear day in, day out? The quantity and quality of words in a child's input are typically measured in terms of total amount of talk and the lexical diversity in that talk. There are disagreements in the literature whether amount or diversity is the more critical measure of the input. Here we analyze the properties of a large corpus (6.5 million words) of speech to children and simulate learning environments that differ in amount of talk per unit time, lexical diversity, and the contexts of talk. The central conclusion is that what researchers need to theoretically understand, measure, and change is not the total amount of words, or the diversity of words, but the function that relates total words to the diversity of words, and how that function changes across different contexts of talk.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantity and Diversity: Simulating Early Word Learning Environments

2018

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“…According to other (more domain-general) explanations, the development is driven by changes in basic cognitive processes, such as selective attention, working memory, and cognitive control (see Fisher, Godwin, & Matlen, 2015; L. Smith, 1989, Rabi & Minda, 2014; Sloutsky, 2010; Sloutsky, Deng, Fisher, & Kloos, 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Selective attention, diffused attention, and the development of categorization

Deng¹,

Sloutsky

2016

Cognitive Psychology

151

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How do people learn categories and what changes with development? The current study attempts to address these questions by focusing on the role of attention in the development of categorization. In Experiment 1, participants (adults, 7-year-olds, and 4-year-olds) were trained with novel categories consisting of deterministic and probabilistic features, and their categorization and memory for features were tested. In Experiment 2, participants’ attention was directed to the deterministic feature, and in Experiment 3 it was directed to the probabilistic features. Attentional cuing affected categorization and memory in adults and 7-year-olds: these participants relied on the cued features in their categorization and exhibited better memory of cued than of non-cued features. In contrast, in 4-year-olds attentional cueing affected only categorization, but not memory: these participants exhibited equally good memory for both cued and non-cued features. Furthermore, across the experiments, 4-year-olds remembered non-cued features better than adults. These results coupled with computational simulations provide novel evidence (1) pointing to differences in category representation and mechanisms of categorization across development, (2) elucidating the role of attention in the development of categorization, and (3) suggesting an important distinction between representation and decision factors in categorization early in development. These issues are discussed with respect to theories of categorization and its development.

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“…Organized knowledge about word and object meanings in semantic memory has long been proposed to affect other cognitive processes (McRae & Jones, ; Tulving, ). A large literature in adults and children shows that semantic knowledge supports information encoding and retrieval (Bjorklund & Jacobs, ; Bower, Clark, Lesgold, & Winzenz, ), word learning (Beckage, Smith, & Hills, ; Colunga & Sims, ; Xu & Tenenbaum, ), language processing (Borovsky, Ellis, Evans, & Elman, , ; Federmeier & Kutas, ), inferential reasoning (Fincher‐Kiefer, ; Fisher, Godwin, & Matlen, ; Gobbo & Chi, ; Medin, Lynch, Coley, & Atran, ), and acquisition of new knowledge (Cliftion & Slowiaczek, ; Pearson, Hansen, & Gordon, ; Vosniadou & Brewer, ). These far‐reaching influences into other cognitive processes are fundamentally important early in development as they support the ability to learn and generalize new knowledge.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When Stronger Knowledge Slows You Down: Semantic Relatedness Predicts Children's Co‐Activation of Related Items in a Visual Search Paradigm

Vales

Fisher

2019

Cognitive Science

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A large literature suggests that the organization of words in semantic memory, reflecting meaningful relations among words and the concepts to which they refer, supports many cognitive processes, including memory encoding and retrieval, word learning, and inferential reasoning. The co‐activation of related items has been proposed as a mechanism by which semantic knowledge influences cognition, and contemporary accounts of semantic knowledge propose that this co‐activation is graded—that it depends on how strongly related the items are in semantic memory. Prior research with adults yielded evidence supporting this prediction; however, there is currently no evidence of graded co‐activation early in development. This study provides the first evidence that in children the co‐activation of related items depends on their relational strength in semantic memory. Participants (N = 84, age range: 3–9 years) were asked to identify a target (e.g., bone) amid distractors. Children's responses were slowed down by the presence of a related distractor (e.g., puppy) relative to unrelated distractors (e.g., flower)—suggesting that children co‐activated related items upon hearing the name of the target. Importantly, the degree of this co‐activation was predicted by the strength of the target–distractor relation, such that distractors more strongly related to the targets slowed down children to a larger extent. These findings have important implications for understanding how organized semantic knowledge affects other cognitive processes across development.

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Development of inductive generalization with familiar categories

Cited by 35 publications

References 70 publications

Quantity and Diversity: Simulating Early Word Learning Environments

Quantity and Diversity: Simulating Early Word Learning Environments

Selective attention, diffused attention, and the development of categorization

When Stronger Knowledge Slows You Down: Semantic Relatedness Predicts Children's Co‐Activation of Related Items in a Visual Search Paradigm

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