Categories are a group of items with shared characteristics. Categorizing helps children create patterns and identify similarities and differences. Categorization is important in language because it gives children a way to group thoughts, process information, store and retrieve ideas, and describe items. By developing skills in this area children can build their vocabulary and memory.
Learning to compare things in terms of similarities and differences is an important analytical skill that leads to classifying and other reasoning abilities. To group or classify objects, children must notice the objects’ properties or attributes and make decisions based on them.