Early Category and Concept Development : Making Sense of the Blooming, Buzzing Confusion: Making Sense of the Blooming, Buzzing ConfusionDavid H. Rakison Assistant Professor of Psychology Carnegie Mellon University, Lisa M. Oakes Assosiate Professor of Psychology University of Iowa Whether or not infants' earliest perception of the world is a "blooming, buzzing, confusion," it is not long before they come to perceive structure and order among the objects and events around them. At the core of this process, and cognitive development in general, is the ability to categorize--to group events, objects, or properties together--and to form mental representations, or concepts, that encapsulate the commonalities and structure of these categories. Categorization is the primary means of coding experience, underlying not only perceptual and reasoning processes, but also inductive inference and language. The aim of this book is to bring together the most recent findings and theories about the origins and early development of categorization and conceptual abilities. Despite recent advances in our understanding of this area, a number of hotly debated issues remain at the center of the controversy over categorization. Researchers continue to ask questions such as: Which mechanisms for categorization are available at birth and which emerge later? What are the relative roles of perceptual similarity and nonobservable properties in early classification? What is the role of contextual variation in categorization by infants and children? Do different experimental procedures reveal the same kind of knowledge? Can computational models simulate infant and child categorization? How do computational models inform behavioral research? What is the impact of language on category development? How does language partition the world? This book is the first to address these and other key cuestions within a single volume. The authors present a diverse set of views representing cutting-edge empirical and theoretical advances in the field. The result is a thorough review of empirical contributions to the literature, and a wealth of fresh theoretical perspectives on early categorization. |
Contents
Chunking Language Input to Find Patterns | 27 |
Categorization | 50 |
Infants Perception | 77 |
Conceptual Categorization | 103 |
Category Formation | 132 |
Distinction in Infancy | 159 |
Infant Categorization | 193 |
Origins | 213 |
Crosslinguistic Evidence | 275 |
A Theory Theory Perspective | 303 |
The Acquisition and Use of Implicit Categories | 360 |
Conceptual Development | 384 |
Conceptual Development from | 403 |
| 419 | |
| 427 | |
Transaction of Child CognitiveLinguistic Abilities | 242 |
Common terms and phrases
7-month-olds ability acquisition adults allophones animacy animals Ari's attention autoencoder basis behavior bird blicket cate categorical perception cats causal powers chap Child Development Cognitive Development Cognitive Psychology Cohen concepts connectionist context contrast correlated attributes count nouns cues developmental changes Developmental Psychology discriminate domain early Eimas evidence example exemplars experiment familiarization form categories function Gelman Gopnik gories gorization inductive inductive inference infant categorization inferences input Journal of Experimental Jusczyk Keil Kemler Nelson kinds knowledge label legs lexical lexical categories linguistic Madole Mandler Mareschal Markman mass nouns McDonough Medin Mervis months of age names networks nonobvious nonsolid nouns Oakes object categories ontological patterns perceptual categorization perceptual constancy perceptual similarity phonemic predict Press properties Quinn Rakison refer response role shape Smith spatial relation speech perception stimuli structure task theory things tion versus Waxman Werker word learning young children young infants Younger