Language acquisition as concept formation; an experimental approach

Abstract.— A concept formation task which in important respects was meant to simulate a natural language acquisition situation was constructed. The experimental focus was on the establishment of the semantic relation between names and their objects. The task contained both relevant and irrelevant stimulus and response items, and different types of informative feedback were given. The results showed that a self-controlled selection strategy was more efficient than a fixed reception strategy. However, the superiority of the selection strategy was found to depend on the level of task difficulty. With an easier task, no difference between the two strategies was observed. Ambiguous feedback turned out to be less effective than unambiguous feedback. The findings suggest that word learning takes place as a concept formation process.