Effects of linguistic and perceptual information on categorization in young children

This paper examines the process of categorization in young children, and tests predictions derived from a model of young children’s similarity judgment. The model suggests that linguistic labels might have greater contribution to similarity judgment for younger children than do other attributes. It is argued that because categorization is based on similarity, the model predicting similarity judgment should also predict categorization. Predictions of the model were tested in the experiment where 4-6 year-olds were asked to perform a categorization task. Results of the experiment demonstrate that young children perform categorization in a similarity-based manner, and support both qualitative and quantitative predictions of the label-asattribute model.