An Experimental Research on the Development of Categorical Concepts in Early Childhood

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Recent studies on conceptual development suggest that various kinds of conceptual relations among objects are available to young children and the conceptual preferences in a given task may reflect context-dependent processes. Children would adjust their responses flexibly according to the particular task demands. The present experimental research was to explore the expected flexible utilization of thematic and taxonomic knowledge by preschool children. The first series of experiments examined the effect of the experimenter's instructions on categorization choices systematically. Four-, 5-, 6-year-old preschool children and adults were given forced-choice categorization tasks opposing thematic, taxonomic and irrelevant alternatives under different instructions. The children's choice behavior indicated that they have both kinds of categorical knowledge and their expression of any particular conceptual preference is context-dependent. However, the data suggests that the younger children's … More utilization of knowledge has not adaptive flexibility and is more variable according to various experimental factors than the older children's. The second series of experiments examined the flexibility of categorical knowledge more directly. Four-, 5- and 6-year-olds were asked to judge successively whether a given object had or did not have any conceptual relation with three different objects. The conceptual relations were basic-level taxonomic, superordinate-level taxonomic, and thematic. The results reveal that six- and even four-year-old children utilize their taxonomic and thematic knowledge flexibly to find conceptual relations among objects. At the same time, some differences in performance were found between the younger and the older children. Almost all the scores of performance measures were lower in the younger than the older. These findings may be due to the development of knowledge base for these conceptual relations and/or cognitive flexibility in general during the preschool period. These possibilities are now under investigation. Less