Children don't give words special power to categorize their world
Tuesday, December 27, 2011 - 15:30
in Psychology & Sociology
New research challenges the conventional thinking that young children use language just as adults do to help classify and understand objects in the world around them. In a new study involving 4- to 5-year-old children, researchers found that the labels adults use to classify items -- words like "dog" or "pencil" -- don't have the same ability to influence the thinking of children.