A Memory Account of Children’s Failure to Generalize Novel Names to Novel Instances and Novel Scenes
Category
Conference Proceedings
Authors
Year
2007
Title
A Memory Account of Children’s Failure to Generalize Novel Names to Novel Instances and Novel Scenes
Journal / book / conference
Proceedings of the European Cognitive Science Conference.
Abstract
When they learn novel names, young children are thought to perfectly segregate an object from its environment and to associate it with its name no matter the scene in which the object is included and, in a post-test, to designate the correct object in novel scenes or contexts and to generalize the association to new instances that might differ from the original object according to various dimensions. We show, in two experiments, that children aged three do not always generalize new names across contexts and across instances even when instances are categorized in the same set as the learning stimuli. These results suggest that novel name generalization is, to some extent, independent of conceptual generalization. These results are interpreted in terms of general mechanisms of memory: it is argued that a failure to generalize novel words to novel stimuli or to new contexts might result from a lack of retrieval cues.