title: Structure mapping and relational language support children's learning of relational categories.
abstract: Learning relational categories--whose membership is defined not by intrinsic properties but by extrinsic relations with other entities--poses a challenge to young children. The current work showed 3-, 4- to 5-, and 6-year-olds pairs of cards exemplifying familiar relations (e.g., a nest and a bird exemplifying home for) and then tested whether they could extend the relational concept to another category (e.g., choose the barn as a home for a horse). It found that children benefited from (a) hearing a (novel) category name in a relational construction and (b) comparing category members. The youngest group--3-year-olds--learned the category only when given a combination of relational language and a series of comparisons in a progressive alignment sequence.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60218-2710, USA. gentner@northwestern.edu
authors.forename: Dedre
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Gentner
authors.forename: Florencia K
authors.initials: FK
authors.lastname: Anggoro
authors.forename: Raquel S
authors.initials: RS
authors.lastname: Klibanoff
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003210:Concept Formation; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D007858:Learning; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011581:Psychological Tests