The facilitating effect of words on discrimination and generalization.

Abstract

It was hypothesized that complex discriminations between similar appearing forms are easier if names applied to forms are distinctive than if names are very similar. The study used 48 4- and 5-year old children as subjects in learning a simple concept formation task. For the same objects one group learned similar sounding names and the other group learned different sounding names. Four measures of learning were employed to reveal initial discrimination, subsequent discrimination of related objects, secondary generalization to related subjects, and general efficiency of concept formation. Statistical results indicate that on each measure the different-names group learned faster than the similar-names group. For discrimination tasks these results were ascribed to primary stimulus generalization.