Concept dominance : orders of dominance among concepts of colours and shapes in pre-school children

Abstract

This study is concerned with the relative dominance of shape end colour concepts in pre-school children; the way in which this dominance is affected by such factors as age, certain variations in the stimuli, and the subject’s understanding of what he is doing during the experiment.

Results showed that twice as many subjects matched by colour as matched by shape, and that on the whole the stimulus variations used here had little effect on the subjects' choices. Subjects' spontaneous comments shed some light on what they were thinking during the experiment. Further investigation is needed to obtain more precise details of the circumstances under which children attend to colour rather than shape or shape rather than colour. On the whole, matching behaviour was consistent over time, although a few subjects were very unreliable. The reasons for this unreliability, different for each subject, are discussed in detail. It is now clear that children of the same age react differently to the stimuli, so future studies should take account of these individual differences among subjects.