From the lexicon to expectations about kinds: a role for associative learning (2005)
| Venue: | Psychological Review |
| Citations: | 34 - 13 self |
BibTeX
@ARTICLE{Colunga05fromthe,
author = {Eliana Colunga},
title = {From the lexicon to expectations about kinds: a role for associative learning},
journal = {Psychological Review},
year = {2005},
volume = {112},
pages = {347--382}
}
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Abstract
In the novel noun generalization task, 2 1/2-year-old children display generalized expectations about how solid and nonsolid things are named, extending names for never-before-encountered solids by shape and for never-before-encountered nonsolids by material.This distinction between solids and nonsolids has been interpreted in terms of an ontological distinction between objects and substances.Nine simulations and behavioral experiments tested the hypothesis that these expectations arise from the correlations characterizing early learned noun categories.In the simulation studies, connectionist networks were trained on noun vocabularies modeled after those of children.These networks formed generalized expectations about solids and nonsolids that match children’s performances in the novel noun generalization task in the very different languages of English and Japanese.The simulations also generate new predictions supported by new experiments with children.Implications are discussed in terms of children’s development of distinctions between kinds of categories and in terms of the nature of this knowledge. Concepts are hypothetical constructs, theoretical devices hypothesized to explain data, what people do, and what people say. The question of whether a particular theory can explain children’s concepts is therefore semantically strange because strictly speaking this question asks about an explanation of an explanation.We begin with this reminder because the goal of the research reported here is to understand the role of associative processes in children’s systematic attention to the shape of solid things and to the material of nonsolid things in the task of forming new lexical categories. These attentional biases have been interpreted in terms of children’s concepts about the ontological kinds of object and substance
