Styles of Categorization and Their Intellectual and Personality Correlates in Young Children

Sigel, Irving E.; Jarman, Philip H.; Hanesian, Helen

doi:10.1159/000270554

Cited by 37 publications

(15 citation statements)

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“…The task has been used to compare children's preference for sorting on the basis ofwhat Markman and Hutchinson (1984) call "taxonomic" and "thematic" relations. Preschool children tend to prefer thematic over taxonomic choices (e.g., they select cow:milk over cow:pig; Inhelder & Piaget, 1964;Sigel, Jarman, & Hanesian, 1967; for reviews see Carey, 1985, andMarkman, 1989, chap. 2). This preference shows an interesting reversal when the child is given a novel name for the target.…”

Section: Characterizing Definitional and Event-based Knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

Associations to unfamiliar words: Learning the meanings of new words

Chaffin

1997

Mem Cogn

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Five experiments were designed to examine whether subjects attend to different aspects of meaning for familiar and unfamiliar words. In Experiments 1-3, subjects gave free associations to high-and low-familiarity words from the same taxonomic category (e.g., seltzer:sarsparilla; Experiment 1), from the same noun synonym set (e.g., baby:neonate; Experiment 2), and from the same verb synonym set (e.g, abscond:escape; Experiment 3). In Experiments 4 and 5, subjects first read a context sentence containing the stimulus word and then gave associations; stimuli were novel words or either high-or low-familiarity nouns, Low-familiarity and novel words elicited more nonsemantically based responses (e.g, engram:graham) than did high-familiarity words. Of the responses semantically related to the stimulus, low-familiarity and novel words elicited a higher proportion of definitional responses [category (e.g., sarsparilla:soda), synonym (e.g., neonate:newborn), and coordinate (e.g., armoire: dresser)), whereas high-familiarity stimuli elicited a higher proportion of event-based responses [thematic (e.g., seltzer:glass) and noun:verb (e.g., baby:cry)]. Unfamiliar words appear to elicit a shift of attentional resources from relations useful in understanding the message to relations useful in understanding the meaning of the unfamiliar word.To understand Sentence I, one must understand the thematic relations of salmon, sturgeon, or brans ion to the verb catch and its agent sportsman. This understanding must be related to knowledge about the practices of sports fishermen to understand the event described in the sentence. I will refer to semantic relations between words linked by an event (e.g., salmon:sportsman, and salmon: catch in Sentence I) as event-based relations. If Sentence I contains a familiar word, salmon, then the reader's task is simply to understand the proposition expressed, information carried largely by event-based relations. On the other hand, if Sentence I contains an unfamiliar word, sturgeon, or a novel word, bransion, then the reader has the additional task of inferring what kind of thing a sturgeon or a bransion is. The reader must infer that a bransion is a kind of fish. I will refer to semantic relations that answer the question, "What kind of thing is it?" (e.g., bransion:fish and salmon:fish) as definitional relations. If Sentence I contains a novel word, then the reader must try not only to understand the proposition expressed but to infer a definitional relation between bransion and some familiar concept, such asfish.The task of understanding a proposition and the task of inferring the meaning of an unfamiliar word may call on somewhat different sets of semantic relationships. One possibility is that people will pay more attention to definitional relations for unfamiliar words than for familiar words. According to this definition hypothesis, the most People are continually learning the meanings of new words. Most are picked up casually from the context, without the help of a formal definition (Jenkin...

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Section: Characterizing Definitional and Event-based Knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

Associations to unfamiliar words: Learning the meanings of new words

Chaffin

1997

Mem Cogn

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“…In studies of the development of sorting abilities in young children, children are typically shown pictures of three things and asked which two belong together and why. Sigel, Jarman and Hanesian (1967) found that younger children gave more explanations in terms of extensional relations, while rationales based on intensional relations became more frequent in older children. Markman and Hutchinson (1984) compared what they refer to as 'taxonomic' and 'thematic' relations, and found that young children's preference for sorting on the basis of extensional relations is found only in contexts in which the words are familiar.…”

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confidence: 91%

Intensional and extensional analogy items: Differences in performance as a function of academic major and sex

Chaffin

Peirce

Bejar

1990

Applied Cognitive Psychology

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Is there a relationship between academic field and ability to use different types of semantic relation? Performance on two types of analogy item in the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) General Test was compared. Intensional relations are inherent in the meanings of the words and are based on shared or contrasting properties (e.g. farmer:person, breeze:gale, alive:dead, beggar:poor). Extensional relations reflect empirical relations between things in the world and are based on contiguity or causality (e.g. farmer:tractor, road:sidewalk, flu:headache).Performance on the two kinds of analogy items was compared for a single administration of the GRE for English and History majors (verbal group, n = 2238) and electrical engineering, computer science, and mathematics majors (practical group, n = 2143). The verbal group did better on intensional, and the practical group did better on extensional analogies. The difference was not explained by a correlated gender difference by which women did better on intensional and men did better on extensional items. Thus differences in the ability to use intensional and extensional relations was related to academic training, although the direction of this relationship was not established. Relations between ideas have been viewed as the building blocks of thought since theGreek philosophers began to ponder the nature of human knowledge. Analogy items are thought to reflect the process of recognizing or creating these relations. This assumption is one reason that analogies have been an important part of tests of verbal ability at least since they were described by Spearman (1923). If relations between concepts do play a central role in thought processes, then it is likely that an aptitude for or training in a particular type of mental ability might be reflected in facility in using a particular type of semantic relation. For example, a person with good verbal skills may be better at using some kinds of relations, while a person who is good at solving practical problems may be better at using other kinds of relations.The present study compared the performance of two groups of Graduate Record Examination (GRE) candidates, one group majoring in fields that emphasize verbal abilities (English and history), the other majoring in fields that emphasize abilities involved in solving applied problems and manipulating sequences of events (electrical engineering, computer science, and mathematics majors). The two groups were

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“…Messick & Fritzky (1963) also argue that Kagan's measures, because of the necessity for verbal responses, may implicate verbal and con ceptual correlates not included in Witkin's measures. To complicate the issue even further, the "descriptive" mode of categorizationtermed descriptive-analytic or simply analytic by Kagan, Moss & Sigel (1963) -has been subdivided by Sigel, Jarman & Hanesian (1967) into descriptive-part whole (supposedly equivalent to the Kagan group's descriptive-analytic) (Sigel, Jarman & Hanesian, 1967) and descriptive-global.…”

Section: Bilingualism and Metacognition: Some Proposalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bilingualism and Cognition: Some Recent Findings

Duncan

Avila

1979

NABE Journal

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The purposes of this cross-sectional study were (1) to assess and describe the English/Spanish relative linguistic proficiency (RLP) of four Hispanic background populations in grades one and three, and (2) on the basis of this description, to assess the performance of children at increasingly higher levels of RLP on three measures of cognitive functioning. Following a rationale emphasizing cognitivedevelopment and learning theory approaches, the primary prediction was that there would be significant differences in performance by children at increasingly higher levels of RLP. In accordance with an interpretation of bilingualism based on the metaset (De Avila & Duncan, 1979) it was predicted that the bilingual children's perform ance on all measures would be superior to that of the monolingual children. The subjects were 204 school children in grades one and three, selected from urban and rural Mexican-American, and urban Puerto Rican-American and Cuban-American communities. The Lan guage Assessment Scales (LAS) were used to identify five linguistic comparison groups: Proficient Bilingual, Partial Bilingual, Monolin gual, Limited Bilingual, and Late Language Learners. One of the most important findings was that there was a positive and significant relationship between degree of relative linguistic proficiency and cognitive-perceptual performance of the children. The Proficient Bilingual children consistently and significantly outperformed the four other comparison groups on two of the.three dependent mea sures. The children identified as Late Language Learners consistently produced the lowest mean scores on all dependent measures. For all groups, level of RLP accounted for significant differences on meaEdward A. De Avila is a Research Associate, School of Education, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA 94305. Sharon E. Duncan is a Research Associate with the Bilingual-Bicultural Division, Southwest Education Development Laboratory, Austin, TX 78701. Both are en gaged in research at De Avila, Duncan and Associates, Bilingualism and Cognitionsures of field dependence and intellectual development. There were no consistent differences between the Limited Bilinguals (children identified as having deficiencies in both languages) and Monolin gual^ This finding supports a reversal of the usual view of limitedEnglish speaking children as being intellectually inferior to their monolingual peers. Furthermore, this no-difference finding is inter preted as support for the proposal that a "threshold level" of bilin gualism is required before the relationship between bilingualism and metacognition becomes apparent. Results of this study would seem to indicate that the minimum threshold level is the "nearnative fluency" in two languages which the least articulate of the Proficient Bilinguals have attained. Finally, implications for education and fur ther research are discussed. INTRODUCTIONBilingualism in the United States, especially as the term is used to describe children of Spanish-speaking background, is often viewed as synonym...

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Styles of Categorization and Their Intellectual and Personality Correlates in Young Children

Cited by 37 publications

References 1 publication

Associations to unfamiliar words: Learning the meanings of new words

Associations to unfamiliar words: Learning the meanings of new words

Intensional and extensional analogy items: Differences in performance as a function of academic major and sex

Bilingualism and Cognition: Some Recent Findings

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