6533b861fe1ef96bd12c4a53

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Children’s Learning and Generalization of Novel Concepts with Comparison Designs

subject

description

Teaching a new word to children usually consists of the concomitant presentation of its phonological form and an example. It is then expected that they will be able, from this unique example, to generalize the new word to other entities of the same category. They must therefore understand which properties of the example are relevant to correctly generalize the new word (Murphy, 2002). The main objective of this thesis work is to better understand the learning situations of a new concept and its generalization to new stimuli. For this, investigated the comparison paradigm and how variations of the parameters of the task affect generalization.After presenting our paradigm of interest, we show how the manipulation of factors such as the number of examples, the semantic distance, or the similarity will affect the generalization of nouns, verbs, and adjectives. In the first study, we show that within-category comparisons are more efficient than between-category comparisons. Moreover, comparing objects with distinctive dimensions is more efficient than comparing objects with similar dimensions. In a second study, we explore transfer effects between two comparison conditions and our results suggest that repeated complex comparisons do not lead to progressive learning. On the contrary, using simpler comparisons at first helps children to interpret more complex comparisons later. Finally, in a third study, we establish a link between executive functions and generalization in a situation of comparison with familiar and unfamiliar material. These studies suggest that the comparison process depends more on children's cognitive flexibility than on their language knowledge.