Categorization and Naming in Children: Problems of Induction (Learning, Development, and Conceptual Change)

In this landmark work on early conceptual and lexical development, Ellen Markman explores the fascinating problem of how young children succeed at the task of inducing concepts. Backed by extensive experimental results, she challenges the fundamental assumptions of traditional theories of language acquisition and proposes that a set of constraints or principles of induction allows children to efficiently integrate knowledge and to induce information about new examples of familiar categories.

Ellen M. Markman is Professor of Psychology at Stanford University.