Children Don’t Give Words Special Power to Categorize Their World
ScienceDaily (Dec. 27, 2011) — 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.
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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.
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The results suggest that even after children learn language, it doesn’t govern their thinking as much as scientists believed.
“It is only over the course of development that children begin to understand that words can reliably be used to label items,” he said.
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“In the past, we thought that if we name the things for children, the labels will do the rest: children would infer that the two things that have the same name are alike in some way or that they go together,” he said.
“We can’t assume that anymore. We really need to do more than just label things.”
To read the full article
http://www.sciencedaily.com/news/mind_brain/
I have just highlighted the first few points… interesting read…