What

What

  • Submitted By: tentsering
  • Date Submitted: 12/02/2008 9:13 AM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 417
  • Page: 2
  • Views: 789

Reaction Paper #7: Oliver Dobrich

This week’s readings covered the topic of language acquisition, particularly as it relates to conceptual category development. The first paper (McDonough) included two experiments in which the results confirmed that young children overextend basic-level nouns in both production and comprehension. The second paper (Nelson et. al.) seemingly unrelated actually extended on the findings of the first article as it demonstrated that when young children ask ‘what is it?’ in regard to a novel artifact, they are more concerned with what its intended function is than what it is called. It was suggested by the authors that “a highly plausible implication is that functional information, when it is available, also plays a role in determining what other artifacts children believe to be of the same kind”. (Nelson et. al., 388) Hence the overextension of basic-level nouns that was found by McDonough could very well be a consequence of this tendency to categorize by function. The converging results of these first two articles made the connection between linguistic development and category formation seem rather inevitable and the last two articles assigned conveniently examined the relationship between the two.
The Yoshida et. al. article confirmed this association between linguistic development and category formation as the infants in this experiment seemed to ‘learn whole categories from hearing a single thing named’. “The addition of redundantly correlated linguistic cues reinforced children’s learning of the links between perceptual cues and category structure”. (Yoshida et. al., 94) Finally, the Xu article investigated whether aspects of language may drive conceptual development. The infants in these experiments succeeded in object individuation tasks when provided with two distinct labels for two objects, both familiar objects/words and unfamiliar objects/words. These findings were “suggestive that language may play a...

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