Yurovsky, Dan
<p>Nov 14, 2014 02:44 PM</p>
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abstract for Dan's FriSem today:</p>
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his title is Signatures of Domain-General Categorization Mechanisms in <b>Color World Learning</b>.</p>
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<b>Learning color words</b> is a difficult problem for young children. Because color is abstract, this has been attributed to <b>difficulty integrating over heterogeneous objects</b> to discover color as a domain of reference.</p>
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On this account, discovering the color domain is slow, but subsequently mapping words to hues is fast.</p>
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Recent work suggests an alternative: <b>children may rapidly identify the color domain</b>, but slowly <b>discover the individual color category boundaries</b>. If so, the learning mechanisms underlying the acquisition of color words should parallel those underlying the<b> acquisition of concrete object categories</b>. </p>
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We test this proposal by predicting childrens performance in a color naming task using three factors studied in category learning: <b>input frequency, category size, and perceptual salience</b>. </p>
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We show that, for the 11 English basic color terms, a colors frequency in CHILDES, category size, and perceptual salience each predict significant variance in its ease of acquisition for 2-4 year olds.</p>
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dfdfdf</p>