Effects of Labels on Children's Perception: Part-of-Speech Variation of the Verbal Stimulus

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effects of varying the part of speech of a verbal label in stimulus predifferentiation training. 48 children in Grades 2 and 4 were randomly assigned to 3 experimental conditions. One group learned to associate distinctive nouns to 4 random forms; a second associated distinctive adjectives to these forms; and a control group viewed the forms without labels. Following verbal training, all Ss judged pairs of these forms, tachistoscopically presented, as “same” or “different.” Results indicated a significant effect of Treatments on the number of discrimination errors. The control group made the most errors, and the distinctive label groups made the fewest. No significant differences were associated with the part of speech of the label.