Naming and categorization in young children: III. Vocal tact training and transfer of function

Following pretraining with everyday objects, 10 children aged from 1 to 4 years were given common vocal tact training with a set of three pairs of arbitrary stimuli of differing shapes; Set 1. Nine children learned to tact one stimulus as "zog" and the other as "vek" in each pair, and all passed subsequent pairwise tests for the corresponding listener behavior to each listener stimulus (i.e., /zog/ and /vek/, respectively). The children were next trained to clap to one stimulus of Pair 1 and wave to the other, and all then showed name-consistent transfer of these behaviors to the stimuli of Pair 2 and Pair 3. Seven children also were given a test of listener responding to experimenter-modeled clap and wave gestures, respectively, which they all passed. Four of the children next participated in a category match-to-sample test for the Set 1 stimuli; all 4 passed. For each pair of two additional six-stimuli sets, Set 2 and Set 3, 3 children were trained to wave to one stimulus and to clap to the other. For each set, all 3 children showed perfect transfer of the vocal tacts trained to Set 1, and of listener behavior both to the auditory stimuli /zog/ and /vek/ and to experimenter-modeled clap and wave gestures. They also sorted the stimuli perfectly in category match-to-sample tests for Set 2, Sets 1 and 2 combined, Set 3, and Sets 1, 2, and 3 combined. The results show that even in very young children, naming is a powerful means of generating new category relations among as many as 18 arbitrary stimuli.