Children’s acquisition of categories and the implications for research in the development of classification schemes

Categorization ability has important implications for children’s use of information retrieval (IR) systems. This paper critiques prior investigations in the field of child acquisition of categories and discusses some of the problems with prevailing approaches and methodologies. The theoretical framework based on essentialism adopted by many researchers is insufficient for explaining certain observations. This paper offers an alternative framework of expertise and linguistic relativity, which affords a perspective on child understanding of categories rooted in cultural values, especially as reflected in language. On this view, emergent understanding of categories is tightly bound to development of language expertise. For some researchers, an adult understanding of language has tainted their interpretation of children’s understanding of categories. Finally, this paper suggests implications for future research toward the development of new classification schemes to accommodate children.