Inductions, generalizations, and extensions: The dubious roles of similarity and language in the development of meaning.
Item
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Title
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Inductions, generalizations, and extensions: The dubious roles of similarity and language in the development of meaning.
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Identifier
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AAI3103142
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identifier
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3103142
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Creator
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Marsh, Rachel.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Laraine McDonough
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Date
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2003
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Psychology, Developmental | Psychology, Experimental
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Abstract
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The goal of the current experiments was to investigate the relationship between conceptual development and language acquisition by assessing the roles of similarity, language, and function in the generalizations and extensions made by young infants and preschoolers. In Experiments 1 and 2 the inductive generalization technique as created by Mandler and McDonough (1993; 1996; 1998; 2000; McDonough & Mandler, 1998) was employed to study the inferences that 14-, 19-, and 24-month-old infants have made about the animal and vehicle domains. Atypical (e.g., an alligator and a shovelor) rather than prototypical (e.g., a dog and a car) exemplars of animals and vehicles were used to assess the roles that perceptual similarity (Experiment 1) and language (Experiment 2) play in infants' categorization abilities. The results of both experiments were consistent in that only the 24-month-olds attended to the perceptual similarity of the exemplars, generalizing more to the target exemplars (those of the same basic-level category as the exemplars used for modeling the activities). It is concluded that the generalizations of younger infants are not facilitated by language and that only older infants (24-month-olds) use either their knowledge of basic-level concepts or their knowledge of the heuristic that items of the same shape usually have the same label to attend to perceptual similarity. The role of language in conceptual development was addressed further in Experiment 3 in which toddlers' extensions of novel words and functional facts were compared in order to explore the language-specificity or domain-generality of some of the proposed constraints in language acquisition. Results indicated that young children extend such facts as systematically as they extend novel words. It is concluded that when the functions of artifacts are made apparent, children derive meaning (semantic rather than episodic knowledge) through the use of domain-general processes that are not specific to language.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
