Teleological explanations account for objects and events by reference to a functional consequence or purpose. Although they are popular in religion, they are unpopular in science: Physical scientists in particular explicitly reject them when explaining natural phenomena. However, prior research provides reasons to suspect that this explanatory form may represent a default explanatory preference. As a strong test of this hypothesis, we explored whether physical scientists endorse teleological explanations of natural phenomena when their information-processing resources are limited. In Study 1, physical scientists from top-ranked American universities judged explanations as true or false, either at speed or without time restriction. Like undergraduates and age-matched community participants, scientists demonstrated increased acceptance of unwarranted teleological explanations under speed despite maintaining high accuracy on control items. Scientists' overall endorsement of inaccurate teleological explanation was lower than comparison groups, however. In Study 2, we explored this further and found that the teleological tendencies of professional scientists did not differ from those of humanities scholars. Thus, although extended education appears to produce an overall reduction in inaccurate teleological explanation, specialization as a scientist does not, in itself, additionally ameliorate scientifically inaccurate purpose-based theories about the natural world. A religion-consistent default cognitive bias toward teleological explanation tenaciously persists and may have subtle but profound consequences for scientific progress.

Can 6-and 8-year-olds (and adults) comprehend common instrument verbs when extended to novel situations? Participants heard eight unusual extensions of common verbs and were asked to paraphrase the verbs' meanings. Half of the verbs used were specified instrument verbs that include the name of the instrument used to perform the action (e.g., a vacuum is used to vacuum); the other half were open instrument verbs (e.g., write) whose function can be performed with a range of objects. Results suggest that children's ability to interpret verb extensions increases with age, that open instrument verb extensions were more difficult to comprehend than specified instrument verb extensions and that performance on verb extension correlates with scores on a standardized test of language acquisition. Verb knowledge continues to develop well beyond the preschool years.There is a commonly held belief that children have accomplished much of language acquisition by at least early elementary school (Brown, 1973;Crain, 1992;Ingram, 1989;Limber, 1973;Marcus et al., 1992;Pinker, 1984Pinker, , 1989Bowerman, 1978). By that time, most children are speaking in complete sentences and using verbs with their accompanying arguments correctly. The fact that verbs prove to be so difficult for young children to learn and extend to new exemplars in laboratory settings (Behrend, 1990;Childers & Tomasello, 2002;Forbes & Poulin-Dubois, 1997;Golinkoff, Jacquet, Hirsh-Pasek, & Nandakumar, 1996;Imai, Haryu, & Okada, 2005;Imai et al., 2008;Kersten & Smith, 2002;Maguire, Hirsh-Pasek, & Golinkoff, 2006), despite verb usage by children in vivo, suggests that verb knowledge may not be as comprehensive as it appears. The present study examined the depth and extent of children's verb knowledge by asking whether 6-and 8-year-olds comprehend novel extensions of familiar verbs. Thus, this study tests the "conservative extension hypothesis" (Ma, Golinkoff, Song, & Hirsh-Pasek, under review) which states that children are more conservative in how they construe the meaning of verbs and therefore tend to extend verbs more narrowly than adults Please address correspondence to: Rebecca Seston, Department of Psychology, Boston University, 64 Cummington Street, Boston, MA 02215, Email: rseston@gmail.com, Phone: (312) 919-1515. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. (Bates, Benigni, Bretherton, Camaioni, & Volterra, 1979;Harris, Barrett, Jones, & Brookes, 1988;Tomasello, 1992). NIH Public AccessThe ability to extend the meaning of a word to new exemplars is one of the best tests of word learning (Behrend, 1995;F...

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Prior research has found that toddlers will form enduring artifact categories after direct exposure to an adult using a novel tool. Four studies explored whether 2- (N=48) and 3-year-olds (N=32) demonstrate this same capacity when learning by eavesdropping. After surreptitiously observing an adult use 1 of 2 artifacts to operate a bell via a monitor, 3-year-olds returned to the demonstrated kind of tool as "for" the task and avoided it for an alternative task over 2 days. Two-year-olds performed similarly after eavesdropping on someone with more discriminable artifacts via the method of a window rather than a monitor. These results demonstrate that toddlers can acquire enduring artifact categories after less than 40 s of surreptitious observation.