Generic language use reveals domain differences in young children's expectations about animal and artifact categories

Cognitive Development

Volumn 28, Issue 1, 2013, Pages 63-75

  Brandone, Amanda C ^a   Gelman, Susan A ^b  

^a LEHIGH UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

Author keywords

Categories; Conceptual development; Domain differences; Generic language; Inductive inference; Na ve theories

Indexed keywords

EID: 84871440252     PISSN: 08852014     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/j.cogdev.2012.09.002     Document Type: Article

References (53)

1. Backscheider A.G., Shatz M., Gelman S.A. Preschoolers' ability to distinguish living kinds as a function of self-healing. Child Development 1993, 64:1242-1257.
2. Bloom P. Intention, history, and artifact concepts. Cognition 1996, 60:1-29.
3. Booth A.E., Waxman S.R. Word learning is 'smart': Evidence that conceptual information affects preschoolers' extension of novel words. Cognition 2002, 84:B11-B22.
4. Booth A.E., Waxman S.R., Huang Y.T. Conceptual information permeates word learning in infancy. Developmental Psychology 2005, 41:491-505.
5. Brandone A.C., Cimpian A., Leslie S.J., Gelman S.A. Do lions have manes? For children, generics are about kinds rather than quantities. Child Development 2012, 83:423-433.
6. Brandone A.C., Gelman S.A. Differences in preschoolers' and adults' use of generics about animals and artifacts: A window onto a conceptual divide. Cognition 2009, 110:1-22.
7. Carey S. The origin of concepts 2009, Oxford University Press, New York.
8. Carlson G.M. A unified analysis of the English bare plural. Linguistics and Philosophy 1977, 1:412-456.
9. The generic book 1995, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. G.M. Carlson, F.J. Pelletier (Eds.).
10. Chambers C.G., Graham S.A., Turner J.N. When hearsay trumps evidence: How generic language guides preschoolers' inferences about unfamiliar things. Language and Cognitive Processes 2008, 23:1-18.
11. Cimpian A., Brandone A.C., Gelman S.A. Generic statements require little evidence for acceptance but have powerful implications. Cognitive Science 2010, 34:1452-1482.
12. Davidson N.S., Gelman S.A. Inductions from novel categories: The role of language and conceptual structure. Cognitive Development 1990, 5:151-176.
13. Diesendruck G., Gelman S.A. Domain differences in absolute judgments of category membership: Evidence for an essentialist account of categorization. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 1999, 6:338-346.
14. Estes Z. Domain differences in the structure of artifactual and natural categories. Memory and Cognition 2003, 31:199-214.
15. Estes Z. Confidence and gradedness in semantic categorization: Definitely somewhat artifactual, maybe absolutely natural. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 2004, 11:1041-1047.
16. Gelman R., Durgin F., Kaufman L. Distinguishing between animates and inanimates: Not by motion alone. Causal cognition: A multidisciplinary debate 1995, 150-184. Clarendon Press, Oxford. D. Sperber, D. Premack, A.J. Premack (Eds.).
17. Gelman S.A. The development of induction within natural kinds and artifact categories. Cognitive Psychology 1988, 20:65-96.
18. Gelman S.A. The essential child: Origins of essentialism in everyday thought 2003, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.
19. Gelman S.A., Bloom P. Young children are sensitive to how an object was created when deciding what to name it. Cognition 2000, 76:91-103.
20. Gelman S.A., Coley J.D., Rosengren K., Hartman E., Pappas T. Beyond labeling: The role of parental input in the acquisition of richly structured categories. Monographs of Society for Research in Child Development. Serial No. 253 1998, Vol. 63(1).
21. Gelman S.A., Chesnick R.J., Waxman S.R. Mother-child conversations about pictures and objects: Referring to categories and individuals. Child Development 2005, 76:1129-1143.
22. Gelman S.A., Goetz P.J., Sarnecka B.W., Flukes J. Generic language in parent-child conversations. Language Learning and Development 2008, 4:1-31.
23. Gelman S.A., Kremer K.E. Understanding natural cause: Children's explanations of how objects and their properties originate. Child Development 1991, 62:396-414.
24. Gelman S.A., O'Reilly A.W. Children's inductive inferences within superordinate categories: The role of language and category structure. Child Development 1988, 59(4):876-887.
25. Gelman S.A., Raman L. Preschool children use linguistic form class and pragmatic cues to interpret generics. Child Development 2003, 74:308-325.
26. Gelman S.A., Star J.R., Flukes J.E. Children's use of generics in inductive inferences. Journal of Cognition and Development 2002, 3:179-199.
27. Gelman S.A., Ware E.A., Kleinberg F. Effects of generic language on category content and structure. Cognitive Psychology 2010, 61:273-301.
28. Goldin-Meadow S., Gelman S.A., Mylander C. Expressing generic concepts with and without a language model. Cognition 2005, 96:109-126.
29. Goodman N. Fact, fiction and forecast 1983, Bobbs-Merrill, New York, NY, (Original work published 1955).
30. Gopnik A., Meltzoff A.N. Words, thoughts and theories 1997, Bradford Books/MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
31. Gottfried G.M., Gelman S.A. Developing domain-specific causal-explanatory frameworks: The role of insides and immanence. Cognitive Development 2005, 20:137-158.
32. Greif M.L., Kemler Nelson D.G., Keil F.C., Gutierrez F. What do children want to know about animals and artifacts? Domain-specific requests for information. Psychological Science 2006, 17:455-459.
33. Hatano G., Inagaki K. Young children's naïve theory of biology. Cognition 1994, 50:171-188.
34. Hollander M.A., Gelman S.A., Star J. Children's interpretations of generic noun phrases. Developmental Psychology 2002, 38:883-894.
35. Kalish C.W. Essentialism and graded membership in animal and artifact categories. Memory and Cognition 1995, 23:335-353.
36. Kalish C.W. Natural and artificial kinds: Are children realists or relativists about categories?. Developmental Psychology 1998, 34:376-391.
37. Keil F. Concepts, kinds and cognitive development 1989, Bradford Book/MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
38. Kemler Nelson D.G., Egan L.C., Holt M. When children ask what is it? What do they want to know about artifacts?. Psychological Science 2004, 15:384-389.
39. Leslie S.J. Generics: Cognition and acquisition. Philosophical Review 2008, 117:1-47.
40. Malt B.C. Features and beliefs in the mental representation of categories. Journal of Memory and Language 1990, 29:289-315.
41. Opfer J.E., Gelman S.A. Development of the animate-inanimate distinction. The Wiley-Blackwell handbook of childhood cognitive development 2010, 213-238. Wiley-Blackwell, New York. 2nd ed. U. Goswami (Ed.).
42. Pappas A., Gelman S.A. Generic noun phrases in mother-child conversations. Journal of Child Language 1998, 25:19-33.
43. Prasada S. Acquiring generic knowledge. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 2000, 4:66-72.
44. Rakison D.H., Poulin-Dubois D. Developmental origin of the animate-inanimate distinction. Psychological Bulletin 2001, 127:209-228.
45. Rhodes M., Gelman S.A. Five-year-olds' beliefs about the discreteness of category boundaries for animals and artifacts. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 2009, 16:920-924.
46. Rhodes M., Gelman S.A. A developmental examination of the conceptual structure of animal, artifact, and human social categories across two cultural contexts. Cognitive Psychology 2009, 59:244-274.
47. Rhodes M., Leslie S.J., Tworek C. The cultural transmission of social essentialism. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 2012, 109(34):13526-13531.
48. Rosengren K., Gelman S.A., Kalish C., McCormick M. As time goes by: Children's early understanding of biological growth. Child Development 1991, 62:1302-1320.
49. Saffran J.R., Aslin R.N., Newport E.L. Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science 1996, 274:1926-1928.
50. Shipley E.F. Categories, hierarchies and induction. The psychology of learning and motivation 1993, Vol. 30:265-301. Academic Press, New York.
51. Simons D.J., Keil F.C. An abstract to concrete shift in the development of biological thought: The insides story. Cognition 1995, 56:129-163.
52. Welder A.N., Graham S.A. The influence of shape similarity and shared labels on infants' inductive inferences about nonobvious object properties. Child Development 2001, 72:1653-1673.
53. Xu F., Tennenbaum J.B. Word learning as Bayesian inference. Psychological Review 2007, 114:245-272.