' The Effects Of Labels On Children's Category Learning

This essay will critically analyse Best, Robinson and Sloutsky’s 2011 experiment titled ‘The effects of labels on children’s category learning’. Best et al (2011) wanted to uncover whether the use of labels facilitates or attenuates categorization among labelled objects. There have been many supporting studies for both sides of the argument. For example, Balaban et al (1997) found that infants ranging from 3 to 12 months were better at learning visual categories when objects where associated with labels. In contrast, a study conducted by two of the researchers of this paper, found that labels decreased the likelihood of 8 to 12 month old infants learning visual categories (Robinson & Sloutsky, 2007). This study was therefore conducted to produce

They were placed in one of the two conditions, either in silence or with auditory stimuli. In both conditions children were presented with a laptop game about aliens on a different planet that were in search of flowers to eat. In the silence condition the children were shown two contrasting categories of cartoon flowers and were asked to pair up the alien with one of the flower categories. The auditory condition involved the same procedure as condition one, however a female speaker informed the children what the two categories were called, i.e. one was called zibblers. The aim for all the children was to learn to discriminate the two flower categories by mapping the two different creatures to each flower category. The researchers found that there was no effect of labels facilitating category learning. The children who were presented with labels (auditory stimuli) showed no signs of learning whereas the children in the silent condition showed some signs over time. These results supported the argument that labels attenuate category

This experiment consisted of 15 preschool children in the control condition. The stimuli were identical to the first experiment but in order to reduce task demands, the children were not asked to pair the alien with the flowers. In the stimuli section of this paper it was made clear that the stimuli would be the same as that of experiment two. However it was not made clear that there would only be one condition and that it was a between participants design. This is later on resolved in the procedure section as they explained the process. However, it would have been helpful to readers to know more details about the design before going straight onto the procedure. Therefore, in order to improve this paper, the researchers could have included more details about the methodology in experiment two. All the children completed four blocks, each with four training trials and six test trials, for a total of 40 trials. Although it was not stated how many minutes/hours the experiment lasted, it can be argued that the use of repeated measures in a study like this is unfavourable. There is always a chance of fatigue and boredom when using this design, however this could be increased significantly when children are participating. It could be argued that researchers can resolve this problem by giving short breaks between each