CNLS '89 Proceedings of the ninth annual international conference of the Center for Nonlinear Studies on Self-organizing, Collective, and Cooperative Phenomena in Natural and Artificial Computing Networks on Emergent computation
Generalization in linguistic category formation based on the prototype effect
ICONIP'08 Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Advances in neuro-information processing - Volume Part I
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In this study, we conducted a series of experiments using stimuli characterized by various attributes in order to understand the categorization process in an infant's pre-linguistic development. The infants are able to assign the same label to members within the same category by focusing attention on specific features or functions common to the members. The ability to categorize is likely to play an essential role in an infant's overall cognitive development. Specifically, we investigated how the infants use different strategies in the process of linguistic categorization. In one strategy, members of a single category are derived from perceptual similarities within the most representative members, i.e., the prototypical members. Alternatively, each membership is established by referring to the linguistic labels for each category provided by the caretaker, in a symbol grounding process. We found that the infant is able to employ these strategies in a flexible manner in its development. We discuss the interplay between different cognitive strategies, including the prototype effects in the infant's cognitive development and the implications for cortical mechanism involved.