Differences in preschoolers' and adults' use of generics about novel animals and artifacts: a window onto a conceptual divide.
Children and adults commonly produce more generic noun phrases (e.g., birds fly) about animals than artifacts. This may reflect differences in participants' generic knowledge about specific animals/artifacts (e.g., dogs/chairs), or it may reflect a more general distinction. To test this, the current experiments asked adults and preschoolers to generate properties about novel animals and artifacts (Experiment 1: real animals/artifacts; Experiments 2 and 3: matched pairs of maximally similar, novel animals/artifacts). Data demonstrate that even without prior knowledge about these items, the likelihood of producing a generic is significantly greater for animals than artifacts. These results leave open the question of whether this pattern is the product of experience and learned associations or instead a set of early-developing theories about animals and artifacts.
Brandone
Amanda C
AC
Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, 530 Church Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA. Brandone@umich.edu
Gelman
Susan A
SA
D000328:Adult; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult