Preschoolers' use of superordinate relations in classification and language

Waxman, Sandra R.; Gelman, Rochel

doi:10.1016/s0885-2014(86)80016-8

Cited by 181 publications

(136 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…dog-cat), whereas older children and adults rely more on categories, a change referred to as an associative-to-categorical shift (e.g., Baldwin, 1989;Waxman & Kosowski, 1990;Waxman & Gelman, 1986; but see Lin & Murphy, 2001). This phenomenon is consistent with the larger categorical effects in Experiments 1 and 4 (concrete words).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The representation of concrete and abstract concepts: Categorical versus associative relationships.

Geng¹,

Schnur²

2015

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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In four word-translation experiments, we examined the different representational frameworks theory (Crutch & Warrington, 2005) that concrete words are represented primarily by category whereas abstract words are represented by association. In our experiments, Chinese-English bilingual speakers were presented with an auditory Chinese word and three or four written English words simultaneously and asked to select the English word that corresponded to the auditory word. For both abstract and concrete words, higher error rates and longer response times were observed when the English words were categorically or associatively related compared to the unrelated conditions and the magnitude of the categorical effect was bigger than the associative effect. These results challenge the different representational frameworks theory and suggest that although category and association are important for representing abstract and concrete concepts, category plays a greater role for both types of words.Keywords: Concrete and abstract words; Semantic processing; Semantic categorical and associative effects; Bilingual translation 3 Investigating the representations of concrete (e.g., mouse) and abstract words (e.g., future) has important implications for understanding how our memory of factual information and general knowledge of the world (i.e., semantic memory) is represented. A number of studies show that concrete words are more easily recognized and memorized in various cognitive tasks (e.g., lexical decision, word reading) compared to abstract words (e.g., James, 1975;Kroll & Merves, 1986; Paivio, 1971;Strain, Patterson, & Seidenberg, 1995; see Paivio, 1991, for a review). More importantly, individuals with semantic memory deficits show a selective impairment of concrete knowledge with relatively preserved abstract knowledge or vice versa (e.g., Breedin et al., 1994; Sirigu et al., 1992;Warrington, 1975;Warrington & Shallice, 1984), suggesting that concrete and abstract concepts are represented in a different way.Concepts may be represented by taxonomic categories defined by the overlap in the semantic features between concepts (e.g., ducks and pigeons are in the bird category, as they have wings, feathers and can fly), or alternatively, by the links between concepts that tend to co-occur in language or which form familiar scenes or events (by association, e.g., "The mouse ate the cheese"). Most research has focused on concrete concepts, showing that semantic category and association both play a key role in representing concrete concepts (e.g., Kalénine et al., 2009;Sachs, Weis, Krings, Huber, & Kircher, 2008;Sachs, et al., 2011;Schwartz, et al., 2011; for reviews, see Hutchison, 2003;Mahon & Caramazza, 2009;Martin, 2007), but the representations of abstract concepts are less explored. The recent different representational frameworks theory proposes that category and association are important for representing both concrete and abstract words but concrete words rely more on category whereas abstract words rely more on ...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The representation of concrete and abstract concepts: Categorical versus associative relationships.

Geng¹,

Schnur²

2015

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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“…The experimenter then explained that children's help was needed to understand what the characters were trying to say. We know from prior work that children are very willing to offer their assistance in this sort of setting, as they consider themselves the true intermediaries between fictional characters and the adult world (e.g., Fisher et al, 1994, Waxman & Gelman, 1986). …”

Section: Experiments 3: What Makes You Think You Are Hearing a Mental mentioning

confidence: 99%

When we think about thinking: The acquisition of belief verbs

2007

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Mental-content verbs such as think, believe, imagine and hope seem to pose special problems for the young language learner. One possible explanation for these difficulties is that the concepts that these verbs express are hard to grasp and therefore their acquisition must await relevant conceptual development. According to a different, perhaps complementary, proposal, a major contributor to the difficulty of these items lies with the informational requirements for identifying them from the contexts in which they appear. The experiments reported here explore the implications of these proposals by investigating the contribution of observational and linguistic cues to the acquisition of mental predicate vocabulary. We first demonstrate that particular observed situations can be helpful in prompting reference to mental contents, specifically, contexts that include a salient and/or unusual mental state such as a false belief. We then compare the potency of such observational support to the reliability of alternate or concomitant syntactic information (e.g., sentential complementation) in tasks where both children and adults are asked to hypothesize the meaning of novel verbs. The findings support the efficacy of false belief situations for increasing the saliency of mental state descriptions, but also show that syntactic information is a more reliable indicator of mentalistic interpretations than even the most cooperative contextual cues. Moreover, when syntactic and observational information sources converge, both children and simulated adult learners are vastly more likely to build conjectures involving mental verbs. This is consistent with a multiple-cue constraint satisfaction view of vocabulary acquisition. Taken together, our findings support the position that the informational demands of mapping, rather than age-related cognitive deficiency, can bear much of the explanatory burden for the learning problems posed by abstract words. Keywordstheory of mind; mental verbs; verb learning; syntactic bootstrapping; language acquisition --many of our complex ideas never had impressions that corresponded to them, and ...many of our complex impressions never are exactly copied in ideas.

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“…Gelman & Wellman, 1991;Golinkoff et al, 1992;Kemler Nelson, 1995;E. M. Markman, 1989; E. M. Markman & Hutchinson, 1984;Waxman & R. Gelman, 1986;Waxman & Kosowski, 1990) and other nonobvious properties (see . Further, these findings, along with those from our previous experiments (Gentner & Namy, 1999), can help resolve the conflicting findings regarding young children's shapebased versus taxonomy-based categorization behaviors.…”

Section: But Is It Alignment?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Making a silk purse out of two sow's ears: Young children's use of comparison in category learning.

Namy

Gentner²

2002

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

283

252

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Comparison mechanisms have been implicated in the development of abstract, relational thought, including object categorization. D. Gentner and L. L. Namy (1 999) found that comparing 2 perceptually similar category members yielded taxonomic categorization, hhereas viewing a single member of the target category elicited shallower perceptual responding. The present experiments tested 2 predictions that follow from Gentner and Namy's (1999) model: (a) Comparison facilitates categorization only when the targets to be compared share relational commonalities, and (b) providing common labels for targets invites comparison, whereas providing conflicting labels deters it. Four-year-olds participated in a forced-choice task. They viewed 2 perceptually similar target objects and were asked to "find another one." Results suggest an important role for comparison in lexical and conceptual development. Children are phenomenally effective word learners. They gain new words at an astonishing rate. Research aimed at explicating the processes by which children accomplish this feat of learning has engendered a paradoxical set of findings. On the one hand, there is considerable evidence that children's categorization of objects is conceptually driven. Young children often categorize on the basis of deep, nonobvious conceptual aspects of objects such as function (e.g., can be eaten), casual properties (e.g., has eyes so it can see), and relations to other things in the world (e.g., grows on

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Preschoolers' use of superordinate relations in classification and language

Cited by 181 publications

References 16 publications

The representation of concrete and abstract concepts: Categorical versus associative relationships.

The representation of concrete and abstract concepts: Categorical versus associative relationships.

When we think about thinking: The acquisition of belief verbs

Making a silk purse out of two sow's ears: Young children's use of comparison in category learning.

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