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Early Category and Concept Development : Making Sense of the Blooming, Buzzing Confusion

Author: David H. Rakison Assistant Professor of Psychology Carnegie Mellon University

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2003-01-09

Total Pages: 472

ISBN-13: 9780195349535

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.

Early Category and Concept Development

Author: David H. Rakison

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2008-12-30

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 0190286598

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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 questions 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.

The Cambridge Handbook of Psycholinguistics

Author: Michael Spivey

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-08-20

Total Pages: 1297

ISBN-13: 1139536141

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Our ability to speak, write, understand speech and read is critical to our ability to function in today's society. As such, psycholinguistics, or the study of how humans learn and use language, is a central topic in cognitive science. This comprehensive handbook is a collection of chapters written not by practitioners in the field, who can summarize the work going on around them, but by trailblazers from a wide array of subfields, who have been shaping the field of psycholinguistics over the last decade. Some topics discussed include how children learn language, how average adults understand and produce language, how language is represented in the brain, how brain-damaged individuals perform in terms of their language abilities and computer-based models of language and meaning. This is required reading for advanced researchers, graduate students and upper-level undergraduates who are interested in the recent developments and the future of psycholinguistics.

Early Category and Concept Development

Author: David H. Rakison

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2008-12-30

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 0199724121

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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 questions 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.

Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8

Author: National Research Council

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2015-07-23

Total Pages: 706

ISBN-13: 0309324882

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Children are already learning at birth, and they develop and learn at a rapid pace in their early years. This provides a critical foundation for lifelong progress, and the adults who provide for the care and the education of young children bear a great responsibility for their health, development, and learning. Despite the fact that they share the same objective - to nurture young children and secure their future success - the various practitioners who contribute to the care and the education of children from birth through age 8 are not acknowledged as a workforce unified by the common knowledge and competencies needed to do their jobs well. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8 explores the science of child development, particularly looking at implications for the professionals who work with children. This report examines the current capacities and practices of the workforce, the settings in which they work, the policies and infrastructure that set qualifications and provide professional learning, and the government agencies and other funders who support and oversee these systems. This book then makes recommendations to improve the quality of professional practice and the practice environment for care and education professionals. These detailed recommendations create a blueprint for action that builds on a unifying foundation of child development and early learning, shared knowledge and competencies for care and education professionals, and principles for effective professional learning. Young children thrive and learn best when they have secure, positive relationships with adults who are knowledgeable about how to support their development and learning and are responsive to their individual progress. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8 offers guidance on system changes to improve the quality of professional practice, specific actions to improve professional learning systems and workforce development, and research to continue to build the knowledge base in ways that will directly advance and inform future actions. The recommendations of this book provide an opportunity to improve the quality of the care and the education that children receive, and ultimately improve outcomes for children.

Categories and Concepts

Author: Iven van Mechelen

Publisher:

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13:

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A book aimed at advanced undergraduates and graduates in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, linguistics, applied mathematics and data analysis.

Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development

Author: Frank C. Keil

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1992-01-30

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 9780262610766

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In Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development, Frank C. Keil provides a coherent account of how concepts and word meanings develop in children, adding to our understanding of the representational nature of concepts and word meanings at all ages. Keil argues that it is impossible to adequately understand the nature of conceptual representation without also considering the issue of learning. Weaving together issues in cognitive development, philosophy, and cognitive psychology, he reconciles numerous theories, backed by empirical evidence from nominal kinds studies, natural-kinds studies, and studies of fundamental categorical distinctions. He shows that all this evidence, when put together, leads to a better understanding of semantic and conceptual development. The book opens with an analysis of the problems of modeling qualitative changes in conceptual development, investigating how concepts of natural kinds, nominal kinds, and artifacts evolve. The studies on nominal kinds document a powerful and unambiguous developmental pattern indicating a shift from a reliance on global tabulations of characteristic features to what appears to be a small set of defining ones. The studies on natural kinds document an analogous shift toward a core theory instead of simple definition. Both sets of studies are strongly supported by cross cultural data. While these patterns seem to suggest that the young child organizes concepts according to characteristic features, Keil argues that there is a framework of conceptual categories and causal beliefs that enables even very young children to understand kinds at a deeper, theoretically guided, level. This account suggests a new way of understanding qualitative change and carries strong implications for how concepts are represented at any point in development. A Bradford Book

Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development

Author: Melissa Bowerman

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2001-01-11

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780521593588

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Leading scholars examine the relationship between child language acquisition and cognitive development.

Language and Concept Acquisition from Infancy Through Childhood

Author: Jane B. Childers

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-02-03

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 3030355942

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This book examines the role of experience-based learning on children’s acquisition of language and concepts. It reviews, compares, and contrasts accounts of how the opportunity to recognize and generalize patterns influences learning. The book offers the first systematic integration of three highly influential research traditions in the domains of language and concept acquisition: Statistical Learning, Structural Alignment, and the Bayesian learning perspective. Chapters examine the parameters that constrain learning, address conditions that optimize learning, and offer explanations for cases in which implicit exemplar-based learning fails to occur. By exploring both the benefits and challenges children face as they learn from multiple examples, the book offers insight on how to better able to understand children’s early unsupervised learning about language and concepts. Topics featured in this book include: Competing models of statistical learning and how learning might be constrained by infants’ developing cognitive abilities. How experience with multiple exemplars helps infants understand space and other relations. The emergence of category-based inductive reasoning during infancy and early childhood. How children learn individual verbs and the verb system over time. How statistical learning leads to aggregation and abstraction in word learning. Mechanisms for evaluating others’ reliability as sources of knowledge when learning new words. The Search for Invariance (SI) hypothesis and its role in facilitating causal learning. Language and Concept Acquisition from Infancy Through Childhood is an essential resource for researchers, clinicians and related professionals, and graduate students in infancy and early child development, applied linguistics, language education, child, school, and developmental psychology and related mental health and education services.

Becoming a Word Learner

Author: Roberta Michnick Golinkoff

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2000-11-02

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 0190284781

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Language acquisition is a contentious field of research occupied by cognitive and developmental psychologists, linguists, philosophers, and biologists. Perhaps the key component to understanding how language is mastered is explaining word acquisition. At twelve months, an infant learns new words slowly and laboriously but at twenty months he or she acquires an average of ten new words per day. How can we explain this phenomenal change? A theory of word acquisition will not only deepen our understanding of the nature of language but will provide real insight into the workings of the developing mind. In the latest entry in Oxford's Counterpoints series, Roberta Golinkoff and Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek will present competing word acquisition theories that have emerged in the past decade. Each theory will be presented by the pioneering researcher. Contributors will include Lois Bloom of Columbia University, Linda Smith of Indiana University, Amanda Woodward of the University if Chicago, Nameera Akhtar of the University of California, Santa Cruz and Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute. The editors will provide introductory and summary chapters to help assess each theoretical model. Roberta Golinkoff has been the director of The Infant Language Project at the University of Delaware since 1974. For the past decade she has collaborated with Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek of Temple University to solve the question of language acquisition in children.