6533b86dfe1ef96bd12c9bc1

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Learning and generalizing new nouns

subject

description

When they learn a new word, young children need to understand which are the relevant dimensions. The relevant dimensions are not always very salient, whereas salient properties might be conceptually irrelevant. This review illustrates the benefits of comparing simltaneously two (or more) examples introduced as members of the same category. This situation has been shown to be more effective for understanding the dimension relevance than the presentation of a single example or of several items introduced sequentially. We present studies showing that situations in which training examples are given are more effective than situations in which the examples are not labelled. We also include comparisons of nouns for objects and nouns for relations (e.g., neighbour, addition). We comment upon the costs of comparison associated with the number of examples, for young children. As a conclusion, simple mechanisms of comparison are presented, including alignment.