Beyond Labeling: The Role of Maternal Input in the Acquisition of Richly Structured Categories

Abstract

Recent research shows that preschool children are skilled classifiers, using categories both to organize information efficiently and to extend knowledge beyond what is already known. Moreover, by 2 1/2 years of age, children are sensitive to nonobvious properties of categories and assume that category members share underlying similarities. Why do children expect categories to have this rich structure, and how do children appropriately limit this expectation to certain domains (i.e., animals vs. artifacts)? The present studies explore the role of maternal input, providing one of the first detailed looks at how mothers convey information about category structure during naturalistic interactions. Forty-six mothers and their 20- or 35-month-old children read picture books together. Sessions were videotaped, and the resulting transcripts were coded for explicit and implicit discussion of animal and artifact categories. Sequences of gestures toward pictures were also examined in order to reveal the focus of attention and implicit links. drawn between items. Results indicate that mothers provided a rich array of information beyond simple labeling routines. Taxonomic categories were stressed in subtle and indirect ways, in both speech and gesture, especially for animals. Statements and gestures that linked two pictures were more frequent for taxonomically related animal pictures than for other picture pairs. Mothers also generalized category information using generic noun phrases, again more for animals than for artifacts. However, mothers provided little explicit discussion of nonobvious similarities, underlying properties, or inductive potential among category members. These data suggest possible mechanisms by which a notion of kind is conveyed in the absence of detailed information about category essences.

Cultural transmission of social essentialism

“…For generic language to facilitate the cultural transmission of social essentialism, children also must hear more generic language for categories for which adults in their communities hold essentialist beliefs. Indeed, we further hypothesized that parents would be more likely to produce generic language to describe categories that they themselves view as supporting the kind of category-based explanations described above (33). Thus, we also tested whether holding essentialist beliefs about a social category leads parents to produce more generic language describing the category when talking to their children.…”

“…Further, whether parents selectively produce generic language for categories for which they themselves hold essentialist beliefs has not yet been examined. [There is evidence suggesting that parents and children produce more generic language for animals than for artifacts (33,43,44), which could be due to domain differences in essentialism. However, because there are many differences in the structure of animal and artifact categories, these studies cannot provide definitive evidence of the role of essentialism in the production of generics.…”

The role of representational status and item complexity in parent–child conversations about pictures and objects

“…For example, the proportion of kind-referring phrases was calculated by dividing the total number of kind-referring phrases by the total number of ontask utterances produced (including kind-referring, individuating, and other). As is standard for analyses of mother-child conversations (e.g., Gelman, Coley, Rosengren, Hartman, & Pappas, 1998), we chose to analyze percentages rather than raw numbers, as we were interested in the relative attention paid to different kinds of concepts (individuals vs. kinds). Analyses of raw numbers would have been misleading in this respect, because sheer amount of talk would have overwhelmed any relative differences.…”

Beyond the Adaptationist Legacy: Updating Our Teaching to Include a Diversity of Evolutionary Mechanisms

“…In this and other research (e.g., Gelman et al, 1998), essentialist language included referring to the whole species with an indefinite article (e.g., "it needs" vs "this snail needs") or using the substantive form of the collective noun (e.g. "the snail needs").…”