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Q: cognitive psychology ( Answered,   0 Comments )
Question  
Subject: cognitive psychology
Category: Miscellaneous
Asked by: git17-ga
List Price: $12.00
Posted: 01 Apr 2003 19:49 PST
Expires: 01 May 2003 20:49 PDT
Question ID: 184648
some researchers propose that language can assist infants/young
children to categorize.  What are two views about the role language
might play in influencing category formation in young children?
Answer  
Subject: Re: cognitive psychology
Answered By: techtor-ga on 02 Apr 2003 01:55 PST
 
Hello Git17,
I have looked around the Internet for articles related to your
question, and I list what I have found below.

Views I might be able to pull from these sources (I am not trained in
psychology, though) would be:
- Language acquisition is a form of Complex Categorical Formation.
- Languages are made of phonemes and these cause a human to make
categorizations to distinguish these phonemes and their meanings.
- Quoting from the first source below: "It is thought that a child
begins categorizing its native language at the age of 2 months (Kuhl,
1992). This means that the child will identify with the speakers of
its native language due to categorical imprinting."
- If you're looking for theories, the "Perceptual Magnet Theory". I
will again quite the same source for a definition: "...if you hear a
sound that is prototypical for your language that you can discriminate
less acutely between a variant vowel of the same type which has
phonetically different character." This has been refuted though by a
study mentioned in the same webpage.

Sources:
Speech Acquisition in Humans as Complex Category Formation
http://hometown.aol.com/starsareours/speechacquisition.html

Abstracts for the Speech Communication and Language Development
Symposium ( Look at Language Acquisition as Complex Category
Formation, somewhere in the middle)
http://www.ling.su.se/konferenser/SpeechCom/abstracts.htm#A%20B%20S%20T%20R%20A%20C%20T%20S

A Model of the Interplay of Speech Perception and Phonology
http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~ehume/papers/Hume_Johnson.pdf

Lab experiments:
Infant Cognition Laboratory at the University of Iowa
http://www.psychology.uiowa.edu/Faculty/Oakes/Oakeslab.htm

Cabrera and Billman experiments results
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~gasser/Playpen/Readings/cabrera+billman.html

Abstracts and Journal lists:
Syntactic Category Formation with Vector Space Grammars - Stolcke
(Research Index)
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/stolcke91syntactic.html

Citations: The structure and formation of natural categories - Fisher,
Langley (ResearchIndex)
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/context/10545/0

OUP USA: Table of Contents: Early Category and Concept Development
http://www.oup-usa.org/toc/tc_0195142934.html


Search words in Google:
"category formation" language child 
(the quotation marks allow the specific phrase to be searched, so
'formation category' will not be included)
"category formation" speech
category formation psychology
"category formation" language concept
"category formation" language role

I hope this has given you the information you need. If you need some
more, do ask for a clarification. Thank you.
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