Part-whole Hierarchies Research Articles

Principles of Organization in Young Children's Natural Language Hierarchies

CALLANAN, MAUREEN A., and MARKMAN, ELLEN M. Principles of Organization in Young Children's Natural Language Hierarchies. CmLD DEVELOPMENT, 1982, 53, 1093-1101. When children think of objects as organized into collections (e.g., forest, army) they become better able to solve certain problems than when they think of the same objects as organized into classes (e.g., trees, soldiers). The present studies indicate that very young children occasionally distort natural language inclusion hierarchies (e.g., oak, tree) into the part-whole structures of collections (e.g., oak, forest). 2and 3-year-old children answered questions about familiar classinclusion hierarchies (e.g., toys-balls and dolls). Although the error rates were very low, the pattern of errors suggests that when they did err, children tended to impose a collection structure on the hierarchies, interpreting the term at the highest level (e.g., toy) as referring only to the entire array (as collective terms do). Children who agreed, for example, that a set of toys are toys, tended to deny that any single is itself a They also tended to pick up several toys when asked for a toy, and to judge sentences such as this is a toy to be silly when referring to a single toy. Because part-whole hierarchies are simpler, young children occasionally impose them on the hierarchically organized object categories they are attempting to learn.