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

近年来的概念发展研究表明，幼儿对客体之间的各种概念关系都有一定的认知能力，在特定的任务中，幼儿的概念偏好可能反映了情境依赖的过程。儿童会根据特定的任务要求灵活调整自己的反应。本实验旨在探讨学前儿童对主题知识和分类知识的灵活运用。第一组实验系统地考察了实验者的指导对分类选择的影响。分别对4、5、6岁学龄前儿童和成人进行了不同指令下的主题、分类和无关选项的强迫选择分类任务。儿童的选择行为表明他们同时具备两种范畴知识，并且他们对某一概念偏好的表达是依赖于语境的。然而，数据表明，年龄较小的儿童的 ...更多信息 知识的利用不具有适应性灵活性，受各种实验因素的影响较大。第二组实验更直接地考察了范畴知识的灵活性。4岁、5岁和6岁的儿童被要求依次判断一个给定的物体是否与三个不同的物体有任何概念关系。概念上的关系是基本层次的分类，上级层次的分类，和专题。研究结果表明，6岁甚至4岁的儿童能够灵活地运用分类和主题知识来发现物体之间的概念关系。与此同时，年龄较小的儿童和年龄较大的儿童之间的表现也存在一些差异。几乎所有的成绩指标都低于年轻人比老年人。这些研究结果可能是由于这些概念关系和/或认知灵活性的知识基础的发展一般在学前阶段。目前正在调查这些可能性。少

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