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

最近关于概念发展的研究表明，幼儿可以获得物体之间的各种概念关系，并且在给定任务中的概念偏好可能反映了上下文相关的过程。儿童会根据特定的任务要求灵活地调整他们的反应。本实验研究旨在探索学龄前儿童对主题和分类知识的预期灵活运用。第一系列实验系统地考察了实验者的指令对分类选择的影响。4岁、5岁、6岁的学龄前儿童和成人在不同的指导下被给予了反对主题、分类和无关选择的强迫选择分类任务。儿童的选择行为表明，他们具有两种类型的范畴知识，他们对任何特定概念偏好的表达都是依赖于语境的。然而，数据表明，年龄较小的儿童的…与年龄较大的儿童相比，更多的儿童对知识的利用不具有适应性灵活性，并且随着各种实验因素的变化而变化。第二系列实验更直接地考察了类别知识的灵活性。4岁、5岁和6岁儿童被要求依次判断一个物体是否与三个不同的物体有任何概念联系。概念关系是基础级分类、上级分类和主题分类。结果显示，6岁甚至4岁的儿童能够灵活地利用他们的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在表现上也存在一些差异。几乎所有的绩效指标得分，年轻的都比年长的低。这些发现可能是由于在学龄前阶段对这些概念关系和/或认知灵活性的知识基础的发展。这些可能性目前正在调查中。较少

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