The Impact Of Conceptual Distance And Manipulated Object Movement On Young Children’s Learning Of Relational Categories

Relational categories are categories defined by entities or by relationships between entities,rather than categories defined by the intrinsic characteristics of category members.When learning relational categories,young children often focus on the properties of objects at the expense of the relationships between them,preferring objects that are similar to the target object rather than having a common relational structure.At the same time,relational categories are not unified by the intrinsic,perceptually stable properties of objects,resulting in slower development of young children’s relational category learning skills and later than young children’s object category learning.Therefore,exploring relational category learning is of some importance for early childhood education.Many factors influence relational category learning in young children,such as comparison,progressive alignment,relational labelling and priming effects.In addition to these influences,in concept studies,class concepts are divided into object and relational concepts,and previous research has found that conceptual distance in concepts has an impact on young children’s relational category learning.Conceptual distance reflects the semantic strength between two sets of concepts;the greater the strength,the closer the distance between the concepts.Jean-Pierre and Amaud(2015)found that the selection of relational categories was better in the far-conceptual distance pairing condition than in the near-conceptual distance pairing condition,although there is inconsistency in the findings regarding the effect of conceptual distance on young children’s learning of relational categories.Gentner,Anggoro and Klibanoff(2011)found that when near-conceptual distance pairs were introduced first,followed by far-conceptual distance pairs,learning of relational categories was facilitated only when label cues were present for 3-year-olds,but their study did not explore the effect of conceptual distance on relational category learning in young children.It is clear that the effect of conceptual distance on young children’s learning of relational categories is unclear,as is the mastery of relational categories by different age groups under the conceptual distance condition,making it important to explore the effect of conceptual distance on young children’s learning of relational categories.The picture initiation effect is one of the factors that influence children’s learning of relational categories,and the picture initiation effect is one of the initiation effects.Two experiments were designed to investigate the effect of conceptual distance on children’s learning of relational categories,and to further investigate whether increasing object movement could facilitate children’s learning of relational categories.Experiment 1 used a mixed experimental design of 2(conceptual distance: near and far)x 3(age: 4,5 and 6 years)to examine the developmental characteristics of young children’s relational category learning under the conceptual distance condition.The results revealed that 4-year-olds were unable to master relational categories in both the near and far conceptual distance conditions,5-year-olds were able to master relational categories in the near conceptual distance condition,but the learning of relational categories was lower in the far conceptual distance condition than in the near conceptual distance condition,and 6-year-olds were able to master relational categories well in both the near and far conceptual distance conditions.4-6-year-olds learned relational categories better in the near conceptual distance condition than in the far conceptual distance condition.The learning of relational categories was better in the near-conceptual distance condition than in the far-conceptual distance condition.This result demonstrates that there are differences in the age-related developmental characteristics of children’s relational categories and that conceptual distance has an impact on children’s learning of relational categories.Based on the results of Experiment 1,4-year-olds were not able to master relational categories under the conceptual distance condition,so Experiment 2 was a mixed experimental design of 2(conceptual distance: near,far)× 2(manipulated object movement: yes,no)with 4-year-olds selected as subjects and manipulated object movement added.It was further examined whether manipulating object movement in the conceptual distance condition could help 4-year-olds to improve their performance in relational category learning.The results found that the provision of manipulated object movement contributed to better learning and mastery of relational categories by 4-year-olds.The following conclusions were drawn from this study:(1)There were differences in children’s learning of relational categories in the near and far conceptual distance conditions,with 4-,5-,and 6-year-olds learning relational categories better in the near conceptual distance condition than in the far conceptual distance condition.(2)In the near-conceptual distance condition,both 5-and 6-year-olds were able to master relational categories,but 4-year-olds were not;in the far-conceptual distance condition,6-year-olds were able to master relational categories well,and 5-year-olds were less effective than 6-year-olds,but 4-year-olds were not able to master relational categories,and 5-year-olds may be in a transitional period.(3)In the learning of relational categories in the near and far conceptual distance condition,4-year-olds learned better in the group with manipulated object movement compared to the group without manipulated object movement.