Studies of Natural Language Concepts. III. Concept Overdiscrimination in Comprehension between Two and Four Years of Age

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Abstract
Young children''s comprehension of natural language concepts was examined by having 2 and 4 yr olds select pictorial instances of 5 concrete semantic concepts. The 2 yr olds were less likely than were the 4 yr olds to consider instances as exemplars of the concepts, especially if the instances were peripheral ones as regards the concepts (e.g., a lion for the concept cat). This tendency of greater overdiscrimination in comprehension by 2 than by 4 yr olds supported Saltz''s theory of the acquisition of natural language concepts which holds that such concepts are initially narrow ones which expand with increasing age.

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