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Acquisition and generalization of novel object concepts by young language learners*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Gail Ross ,
Katherine Nelson ,
Harriet Wetstone  and
Ellen Tanouye
Gail Ross*
Affiliation:
Cornell University Medical College
Katherine Nelson
Affiliation:
City University of New York
Harriet Wetstone
Affiliation:
Institute for Living, Hartford, CT
Ellen Tanouye
Affiliation:
Teachers College, Columbia University
*
* Gail Ross, Perinatology Center, New York Hospital – Cornell Medical Center, 525 E. 68th Street, New York, NY 10021, USA.
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Abstract

Twenty-month-old children learned to recognize nonsense labels for five novel object concepts and were tested on generalization to variants of these concepts. Children were presented with either one or three examples of each object type during learning sessions. Results showed that receptive learning of names for object concepts was significantly related to a number of possible manipulations specific to each object type and to labelling by children. Children's generalization choices were consistent with adults' ranking of similarity of variants to concept prototypes. Children who learned less well were more likely to generalize to new instances of an object concept and to a greater number of variants if they had been exposed to three rather than one example during training sessions. Results also support the hypothesis that differentiation of objects in interaction is important to the formation of an object concept at this age.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , February 1986 , pp. 67 - 83
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

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Footnotes

*

This study was supported by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to William Kessen and Katherine Nelson. The research was carried out when the authors were located at Yale University. We appreciate the assistance of Sally Barnes, Margo Nelson, Janine Eshelman, Lurline deVos, Nancy Kellett and Ira Blake, who made valuable contributions to carrying out the experiment and to its coding and analysis. We are also grateful to graduate students who rated objects and the children and their parents who participated in the study.

References

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