The Role of Comparison and Common Labels in Very Young Children Conceptual Knowledge.

TAVERNA, A. S. Y PERALTA, O. A.

University of Würzburg. Alemania

Congreso; 20th Biennial ISSBD Meeting; 2008

International Society for the Study of Behavioural Development.

Comparison mechanisms and object names have an important role in lexical and common conceptual knowledge in preeschool children (Gentner & Namy, 1999; Namy & Gentner, 2002). The purpose of this research consists in examining if comparison and object names could facilitate the formation of categories even at an earlier age. Children’s performance was assessed with a novel pretest-process-postest task design. Experiment 1 examined if the comparison mechanism among familiar targets can benefit 30-months-old children conceptual performance. A group of children was introduced to familiar targets that share both perceptual and relational commonalities, while other group was invited to compare objects that share only perceptual commonalities. Only the group who was invited to compare the relational commonalities formed categories. Experiment 2 examined the role of common labels in the formation of familiar categories by 30-months-old children. Some children were introduced to common labels for the targets to be compared while others were invited to compare the targets with a conflicting label. Only the group who received the common label succeeded in categorization. The data obtained with this novel design allowed us to demonstrate that comparison and common labels have an important role highlighting common knowledge and enabling children to form abstract knowledge at quite an earlier age than described before.