Categorization and Grammatical Rule Use by Preschool Children

Abstract

The relationship between cognition and language was explored with 4 preschool subjects who were taught a contrived grammatical rule contrasting size of visual stimuli. A match-to-sample task was presented before and after grammatical rule training to determine if subjects would shift to matching visual stimuli by size from an alternative strategy. Subsequent match-to-sample training by size and then by the alternative strategy was done to assess the effects of the two different matching strategies on the subjects' use of the grammatical rule. There were no effects observed between grammatical rule use and match-to-sample performance. Implications for the relationship between cognition and language are discussed.