title: Mosuos' awareness of taxonomic relations in word associations, lexicon decisions and semantic categorizations.
abstract: The development of representations for taxonomic categories is influenced by many factors, such as age, life experiences, and education. It was hypothesized that Mosuos might be aware of taxonomic relations differently than Hans, as indicated by Sha (1996). Three experiments--word associations, lexicon decisions, and semantic categorizations--were conducted on young adults of Mosuos and Hans and consistent results were obtained: the Mosuos were found both similar to and different from the Hans in their experimental performance. They were apparently aware of taxonomic relations less than the Hans among categories of different levels and among categories of basic level, consistent with the conclusion that the uniqueness of a specific culture influences the people's representations for the hierarchically structured taxonomic categories (López, Atran, Coley, Medin & Smith, 1997). The present forms of education did not seem to be as effective as educators expected to help promote Mosuo children's development of knowledge of taxonomic categories. If school education would be available that is compatible with the cultural value of a relatively isolated, small population, such as Mosuos, and is of practical value for the young children to develop a better knowledge of the world, then a study would be of critical value into how educated individuals would be different from uneducated ones in their awareness of taxonomic relations.
authors.affiliation: Psychology Application Research Center, South China Normal University, China Tianhe Middle School of Guangzhou, China.
authors.forename: Jijia
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Na
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Lin
authors.forename: Degao
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Li
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001364:Awareness; D002681:China; D003469:Culture; D003657:Decision Making; D004522:Educational Status; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D012660:Semantics; D014825:Vocabulary