Lexical categorization modalities in pre-school children: Influence of perceptual and verbal tasks

This study investigates how categorical organization functions in pre-school children, focusing on the dichotomy between living and nonliving things. The variables of familiarity, frequency of word use and perceptual complexity were controlled. Sixty children aged between 4 years and 5 years 10 months were investigated. Three tasks were used: a naming task; a concepts deconstruction task; and a concepts construction task. Results indicated that age influences: (a) the picture naming and concepts deconstruction task, with older children performing better, and (b) the prevalence of functional features for the inanimate stimuli. These data show that it would be risky to argue that there is a pre-eminence of one concept component without considering the task involved, which is of particular importance in the educational domain.