Nameabiity Effect in Children in the Age Period from 6 to 9 on the Basis of Artificial Names

There are numerous factors that infulence the success of categorisation. In particular, the nameability effect: higher learning accuracy occurs with examples featuring easily nameable parts compared to those with difficult-to-name parts. This effect was initially discovered and is known for adults, and currently researchers are investigating its age boundaries. In the present study, we aimed to examine age-specific features of the nameability effect on a sample of children aged 6-9 years (N = 123, f = 47%) and potentially found the lower age boundary of the effect emergence. Instead of using traditional materialы with easy and difficult to name features, we created a formative experiment with novel stimuli according to the tasks of the study. First, we designed a lesson where we taught our participants from the verbal and symbol conditions associative pairs consisting of figures with either an artificial name or a symbol. Subsequently, all participants – from verbal or symbol and neutral conditions – performed the same category learning task, where these figures from associative pairs became parts of category examples. According to our hypothesis, learning success should be higher with materials involving verbal associations than non-verbal ones. This hypothesis was not confirmed. The results we obtained in the study drastically differ from previous results on the topic of nameability effect in children. We found that verbal labels decreased overall accuracy in a categorisation task. Children of all ages were unsuccessful in a category learning task. Some of potential explanations are given in this work as well as further considerations on how to investigate the effect in the future are given. Taken together, our results open a new venue for the discussion on how language influences category learning in children of various ages.