Acquisition of basic object categories by severely handicapped children.
The present study was designed to investigate category acquisition (a) as a function of initial exposure to only good exemplars as opposed to exemplars varying in goodness-of-example and (b) as a function of exposure to single as opposed to multiple exemplars. This research was undertaken within the framework of the best-example theory of categorization. Severely handicapped prelinguistic children and teenagers were selected as subjects because of the extreme difficulty they experience in generalizing. Experimental control was obtained through a repeated-measures Latin square design. The data indicated that training based on 1 or more good exemplars resulted in significantly more accurate generalization than training with a range of exemplars. In fact, training with a range of exemplars did not result in generalization above chance levels. Training based on multiple good exemplars tended to lead to more accurate generalization than training based on a single good exemplar. The results are explained in the context of the best-example theory and are briefly related to teaching practices.
D000293:Adolescent; D002648:Child; D003071:Cognition; D006233:Persons with Disabilities / Q000193:education / Q000523:psychology*; D005793:Generalization, Psychological; D006801:Humans; D007100:Imitative Behavior; D007804:Language Development; D013663:Teaching / Q000379:methods