Categorization and Naming in Children: Problems of Induction

Abstract: Which words do children learn earliest, and why? These questions bear on how humans organize the world into semantic concepts, and how children acquire this parsing . A useful perspective is to think of how bits of experience are conflated into the same concept . One possibility is that children are born with the set of conceptual conflations that figures in human language . But assuming (as we will) that most semantic concepts are learned, not innate, there remain two possibilities . First, aspects of perceptual experience could form inevitable conflations that are conceptualized and lexicalized as unified concepts. In this case, we would have cognitive dominance : concepts arise from the cognitive-perceptual sphere and are simply named by language. A second possibility is linguistic dominance : the world presents perceptual bits whose clumping is not pre-ordained, and language has a say in how the bits get conflated into concepts . We propose that both cognitive and linguistic dominance apply, but to different degrees for different kinds of words (Gentner 1981, 1982). Some bits of experience naturally form themselves into inevitable (preindividuated) concepts, while other bits are able to enter into several different possible combinations.

TL;DR: Two experiments tested the proposal that experience in learning object names tunes children's attention to the properties relevant for naming—in the present case, to the property of shape—and thus facilitates the learning of more object names.

TL;DR: The longitudinal follow-up will allow us to detect risk and protective factors for general health among Minas Gerais Court workers and will be useful to support health policies in the Brazilian judiciary sector.

TL;DR: The extent to which people can focus attention in the face of irrelevant distractions has been shown to critically depend on the level and type of information load involved in their current task as discussed by the authors.