Children's Use of Extensional and Intensional Information in the Acquisition of Basic and Superordinate Categories.

Autor/inn/en	Horton, Marjorie S.; Markman, Ellen M.
Titel	Children's Use of Extensional and Intensional Information in the Acquisition of Basic and Superordinate Categories.
Quelle	(1978), (13 Seiten)Verfügbarkeit
Beigaben	Tabellen
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; Monographie
Schlagwörter	Tagungsbericht; Cognitive Development; Cognitive Processes; Communication Skills; Concept Formation; Early Childhood Education; Kindergarten Children; Language Acquisition; Language Patterns; Language Research; Language Skills; Linguistics; Preschool Children + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Kognitive Entwicklung; Cognitive process; Kognitiver Prozess; Kommunikationsstil; Concept learning; Begriffsbildung; Early childhood; Education; Frühkindliche Bildung; Frühpädagogik; Sprachaneignung; Spracherwerb; Sprachmodell; Sprachstruktur; Sprachforschung; Language skill; Sprachkompetenz; Linguistik; Pre-school age; Preschool age; Child; Children; Pre-school education; Preschool education; Vorschulalter; Kind; Kinder; Vorschulkind; Vorschulkinder; Vorschulerziehung; Vorschule
Abstract	Forty-eight nursery school and kindergarten children participated in a study of concept learning. The study focused on children's use of intensional and extensional information in the acquisition of basic and superordinate categories. The intension of a concept is its definition or set of defining attributes; its extension is the set of all exemplars. The children completed a concept training task using natural categories assigned into basic and superordinate levels. Each child was trained on two categories at the same level, one through extensional information alone and one through combined extensional and intensional information. After training on both categories, each child participated in two successive tests for each category: a discrimination test that measured learning in terms of the child's ability to identify old training exemplars as positive, to generalize to new exemplars, and to discriminate between exemplars and distractors; and a sorting exercise that required the children to sort a series of pictures used in the training task into groups of positive exemplars and nonexemplars. The results indicated that the children acquired basic level categories more easily than superordinate categories, that intensional information benefited the acquisition of categories only at the superordinate level, and that children's ability to take advantage of the intensional information for their acquisition of superordinate categories developed with age. (FL)
Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2004/1/01