Categorization and Naming in Children: Problems of Induction

by Ellen M. Markman

In this landmark work on early conceptual and lexical development, Ellen Markman explores the fascinating problem of how young children succeed at the task of inducing concepts. Backed by extensive experimental results, she challenges the fundamental assumptions of traditional theories of language acquisition and proposes that a set of constraints or principles of induction allows children to efficiently integrate knowledge and to induce information about new examples of familiar categories.

Genres: Language

264 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

Reviews

[Will Dorrell · Rating 2 out of 5]

A deep dive into the psychological explorations of how children learn to label things.

Unless you are going to do this research I would recommend reading the intro and conclusion, which do an amazing job of summarising the key questions and findings, which are very interesting.

The main body of the book is intensely detailed. It's impressive rigorous science (I don't read most psychology, so it was good to see this doesn't live up to the bad reputation some psychology research has), but too detailed to enjoy.

The main questions and findings I found very exciting though!