| Among the studies of young children's category learning and classification, there's some dispute about what would young children use as the base of their categorization. On the one hand, some researchers regard the perceptual properties such as shape, color and size and so on; on the other hand, some researchers thinks the base of young children's categorization is the conceptual properties such as category label and function and so on. In our opinions, much factors will affect young children's categorization, and whether they depend on the perceptual properties or conceptual properties is not defined yet. But more researchers prefer to agree with the former theory, namely they think in most cases young children would use their perceptual predominance in the category learning and categorization, and they would rather use the perceptual properties than conceptual properties as the base of categorization. In our study, we want to explore when would young children use the conceptual properties to category and when would they use the conceptual properties in categorizing, it enlarges and deepens the latter theory and conciliates the distipute.The materials in our study are colorful pictures of objectives. We request the 4-year-old children to finish the classification task. In experiment 1, we testify Gentner's theory about comparison, he thinks after comparing the stimulates of the same category and similar in perceptual properties, young children would categorize on the base of conceptual-matching. Furthermore, we discuss when the comparability demission is fixed, how would comparison affect the children's categorizing. In experiment 2, we discuss when the young children are familiar with the stimulates or the relations of stimulates, they would choose the conceptual properties as the base of categorization. In experiment 3, we use pictures or verbs to hint young children's category knowledge, and then they would categorize on the base of conceptual-matching. |
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