Abstract

The present study was intended to overview researches on the relationship between natural categories and inductions in young children which are investigated recently by Gelman or Gelman and Markman. Furthermore the present study intended to discuss the implication of results of their studies in contrast to implication of results from class-inclusion task and classification task. Based on the results of Gelman or Gelman and her colleagues researches, there were very interesting interpretations on the young children's categorical knowledge, which are as follows. Preschool children(3-and 4-year old) drew more inferences based on category membership than on superficial and perceptual appearances. But preschool children do not expect richer internal structure on the natural kinds than artifacts. In older children (2-graded), there was shown that more powerful effect of naturalness on the patterens of induction only within basic-level categories. Generally young children based their inferences predominantly on common category membership thereby overgerneralizing the importance of the category label. The results of these studies suggest that young children certainly realize that categories share more deeper, internal attributes than superficial similarities. This implication is incongruent with the implication of the results from class-inclusion task and classification task that young children based on perceptual attributes than conceptual attributes in categorizing objects. This incongruency of the interpretation of young children's categorical knowledge is discussed in relation to category hierarchy and the direction of inference.