Retrieval from semantic memory by young children.
Elizabeth F. Loftus, Ellen H. Grober · Developmental Psychology · 1973
Olver and Hornsby (1966) asked young children to tell them how different items were alike. For example, how are and alike? At the age of 6, over half of the groupings made by children are what Olver and Hornsby call groupings [p. 74]; that is, are constructed on the basis of a common feature(s) characterizing the items included in the group. Thus, for example, banana, peach, and potato can be placed in a superordinate grouping because they are all food. Even children only 3 years old, when presented with an array of pictures and asked to pick out all the animals, all the things to eat, and so forth, could easily accomplish the task (Olver & Hornsby, 1966, p. 82). These data suggest that at least some of the concepts that are learned very early in the semantic development of children are organized into a hierarchical structure composed of categories (e.g., food) and instances (e.g., banana). The structure appears to be similar (although obviously less complete) to the structure that adults possess (cf. Freedman & Loftus, 1971). If such a structure exists for children, how is information retrieved from it? To what extent does the child's retrieval mechanism resemble the adult retrieval mechanism? These are questions to which this report is addressed. To obtain information about adult retrieval, Freedman and Loftus (1971) presented subjects with a noun category plus a restricting letter or adjective and asked them to produce an instance of the category which satisfied the restriction, A general model of the retrieval process assumed that the entire process consists of at least two major steps: (a) entering the category and (b) finding an appropriate member of that category. When the category was presented first, responses were .25 second faster than when the category was presented second; this difference was taken as evidence that category entry takes approximately .25 second. The present authors investigated the generality of this finding by extending the Freedman and Loftus study to young children.