THE INFLUENCE OF CATEGORY LABELING UPON CATEGORY CLUSTERING IN KINDERGARTEN CHILDREN

The present experiment was designed to investigate the influence of category labeling upon category clustering in free recall of pictures and words in kindergarten children. A 2×2×2 factorial design was used, which incorporated the presence or absence of category labeling, the picture and word stimuli, and the number of trials(1 and 2). The last factor was a within variable. The Ss were 40 kindergateners with a mean of 6 years and 4 months, who were assigned to one of the following 4 conditions: Picture-labeling, Picture-control, Word-labeling, and Word-control. S was presented a list of 32 picture instances of that of 32 word instances. Each list was composed of 8 instances from each of four categories (animal, vehicle, vegetable, and stationery) as is shown in Table 1. The Ss assigned tothe labeling conditions were given 32 instances one by one with their category names such as E' saying, "A lion is an animal." The remaining Ss were notgiven such categorynames. The study and free recall trials were run twice alternatively. Immediately after the 2nd free recall trials, 5s were required to recall instances from each of four categories in order to examine the effect of category cues upon the output process in free recall. The main results are given in Tables 2 and 3. (a) The main effect of category labeling was not statistically significant both for recall and clustering, which were not consistent with the present prediction. But detailed analyses revealed that clustering was facilitated by category labeling for the 1st recall of picture instances. (b) The main effect of picture and word was significant, indicating that picture instances produced more recall and clustering scores than word instances. The results were discussed in relation to previous studies on the following two points: (a) the influence of category labeling upon category clustering, and (b) the functional difference picture and word stimuli