Categorizing Choices by Children Aged Three to Seven: What Do Their Justifications Reveal?

The hypothesis that children's ability to categorize evolves from context- to similarity-based categorizations was tested in an experiment in which Brazilians (N = 100, aged 3-7) performed the task of choosing which two out of three pictorial items were more closely related & explain their rationale for pairing the items selected. Qualitative & quantitative analyses only partially confirmed the hypothesis: although context predominated as a criterion in the younger population (ages 3-4) & semantic & functional similarity in the older population (ages 5-7), the differences were not significant enough to postulate a sharp developmental division in the ability & cognitive strategy type applied in categorization. Similarity was quite frequently utilized as a criterion by younger children, while contextual classification persisted in older children. It is concluded that prototypical & schematic categorization structures coexist in verbal memory & cognitive processing during child linguistic development. 4 References. Z. Dubiel