Development of language-mediated abstraction: Insights from word ladders task

Abstraction is a fundamental cognitive capacity underlying the organization of semantic knowledge. This study examines the development of language-mediated abstraction in school children, defined as the ability to generate increasingly more general lexical items from a given prompt, and investigates how this ability is shaped by word semantics. Children aged 9–13 years completed a longitudinal, generative word-production task in which they constructed taxonomic hierarchies by linking words through categorical inclusion relations (IS-A, e.g., dog IS-A animal), starting from prompts that varied in concreteness. Their productions were analyzed in terms of hierarchical productivity (ladder length) and validity (accuracy of taxonomic relations). Results revealed that language-mediated abstraction improves over time, particularly among younger children. Moreover, these longitudinal changes could not be explained by chronological age alone. Improvements occurred across semantic domains, although abstract prompts consistently elicited shorter taxonomic hierarchies than other concepts. Developmental variations also emerged in abstraction pathways, with nontaxonomic semantic relations occurring most frequently in children of intermediate age and in response to abstract and emotional concepts. Together, the findings provide evidence that concreteness and specificity constitute dissociable dimensions of abstraction, each contributing uniquely to the development and organization of semantic categories. By adopting a generative, longitudinal approach, this study offers novel insight into how children progressively construct and refine hierarchical conceptual knowledge through language.