ABSTRACT

Past research on children’s categorizations has centered on the mechanism of children’s use of multiple cues in categorization. This paper examines correlations between perceptual cues and linguistic cues. The question asked is a classic one in learning theory: given two redundant cues, does the learner learn more about each than when one cue independently predicts the category? This question has special cogency in the context of children’s language learning. We show that when linguistic cues correlated with perceptual cues, children learn more about perceptual cues.