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3-5 Years Old Children's Learning Of Relational Categories

Posted on:2010-02-26Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:X J HuangFull Text:PDF
GTID:2167360275456272Subject:Basic Psychology
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
Relational categories are categories whose membership is determined by a specific relation that category members have with another entity or category. Earlier research on categories has focused on object categories, in fact, relational categories are prominent in everyday life and relational categories play a key role in abstract thought.In this research, base on the prior work on relational categories, we explore two means of promoting relational abstraction: comparison and relational labels. The preliminary experiment offered imformation about at what age can children learn relational categories. We explored 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children's learning of ralational categories in Relational word condition and Analogy only condition. In Experiment 1, 5-,and 4-year-old children in both conditions were able to learn the relations, but performed better if relational lables were added. There-year-olds were unsuccessful in both conditions. In Experiment 2 we used a progressive alignment training method, we first give them closely similar pairs, then progressed to those used in Experiment 1. The results showed that after the training 3-year-old children were able to learn the relation.The results demonstrate that both comparison and relational lauguage can help children to see relational commonalities among analogical situations.
Keywords/Search Tags:relational categories, comparison, lauguage lable, similarity
PDF Full Text Request
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