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15 - Development of Qualitative Thinking

Language and Categorization

from Subpart II.2 - Childhood and Adolescence: The Development of Human Thinking

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2022

By
Susan A. Gelman
Edited by
Olivier Houdé  and
Grégoire Borst
Olivier Houdé
Affiliation:
Université de Paris V
Grégoire Borst
Affiliation:
Université de Paris V
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Summary

This chapter examines the role of language in children’s categorization. Children categorize every time they treat discriminably different items as in some way the same. A nine-month-old tosses a foam ball, a round candle, and American football, treating them all as throwable objects. A toddler points to a cow and calls it a “dog,” treating all four-legged mammals as somehow alike. A three-year-old wisely observes, “Butterflies have bones,” making a general claim about the abstract set of butterflies. Categories organize human experience, provide the building blocks of thought, and operate on every sort of content: objects, persons, events, mental states, abstract ideas, and logical elements.

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Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Development , pp. 341 - 360
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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