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Linguistic influences on categorization in preschool children: a crosslinguistic study*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Ivelisse M. Martinez  and
Marilyn Shatz
Ivelisse M. Martinez*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
Marilyn Shatz*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
*
Developmental Psychology, University of Michigan, 525 East University Ave., Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1109.
Developmental Psychology, University of Michigan, 525 East University Ave., Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1109.
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Abstract

Research on categorization suggests that information conveyed by language may be a guide for children performing classification tasks. In our study we asked whether differences between languages in linguistic form influence this performance. Thirty-five three- and four-year-old monolingual speakers of Spanish and English, languages differing in the way they encode gender, were tested in their native countries on a classification task of familiar objects. This task assessed strategies used in (1) a free sort, (2) a sort with instructions to use natural gender, and (3) one (for the Spanish speakers) with specific instructions to use grammatical gender. Half of both the Spanish and the English groups used animacy as a sorting strategy in the first sort, whereas the majority of both groups sorted by natural gender in the second sort. Most Spanish speakers also used grammatical gender as a categorizing strategy in at least one of the sorts. Results suggest that both instructional context and language-specific experience can influence the ways children classify familiar referents.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 23 , Issue 3 , October 1996 , pp. 529 - 545
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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Footnotes

[*]

This work was supported by an NSF Predoctoral Fellowship to the first author. We thank Ayla Balci and Tania Rodriguez for their assistance in collecting the data and Patrice S. Beddor and William Croft for comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. Finally, we gratefully acknowledge the children, parents and staff of the following schools for their generous co-operation: the University of Michigan Children's Center and Mamolina-Centro Creativo Montessori.

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