THE PLACE OF PERCEPTION IN CHILDRENS CONCEPTS

Current research on children's concepts and categories reflects a grow ing consensus that nonperceptual knowledge is central to concepts and determines category membership, whereas perceptual knowledge is periph eral in concepts and at best a rough guide to category membership. In this article, we assess the theoretical and empirical bases for this v iew. We examine experiments that seem to support the idea that concept s are principally nonperceptual, and find that the evidence is not com pelling. We then turn to research on children's lexical category forma tion, which highlights multidirectional interactions between perceptio n, language, and other kinds of knowledge, in specific contexts. This evidence suggests that conceptual knowledge encompasses both perceptua l and nonperceptual knowledge as equal and interacting partners. The e vidence also suggests a view of concepts, not as mentally represented structures, but as assemblies of knowledge computed on-line in specifi c task contexts.