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Updated: Sep 28, 2026

Defining the Role Of Language in Infants' Object Categorization with Eye-tracking Paradigms
Published on: February 8, 2019
Category-generation performance of bilingual children: the influence of condition, category, and language
Elizabeth D Peña1, Lisa M Bedore, Rebecca Zlatic-Giunta
1Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Texas at Austin, 78712, USA. lizp@mail.utexas.edu
Abstract:
Research suggests that young children use a script-based slot-filler strategy to develop categories. Children are reported to develop a taxonomic strategy by about age 8. The purpose of this study was to examine how bilingual (Spanish-English) children used taxonomic versus slot-filler strategies in a category-generation task presented in each language. Results indicated that although younger bilingual children (M age = 5;1) generated approximately equal numbers of items in both conditions, older bilingual children (M age = 6;5) were beginning to demonstrate a taxonomic bias. Furthermore, although bilingual children tended to generate similar numbers of items in each language under the different conditions, comparisons between the two languages indicated that a large proportion (68.40%) of items was unique to either language.
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