“…It should be acknowledged that if our hypotheses are supported, our findings would also be consistent with a competing conceptualization of children's label-learning strategies, one positing that children's mapping behavior is influenced by their ontological understanding of the categories (e.g. Bloom, 2000;Booth & Waxman, 2002a/b;Booth et al, 2005;Gelman, 1988;Keil, 1994;Mandler & McDonough, 1998). Its proponents argue that children exhibit a shape bias "not because of a direct correlation with categories, but because [shape] is causally related to deeper conceptual qualities of objects from a broad range of ontological categories" (Booth & Waxman, 2002a; p. B13; see also Bloom & Markson, 1998;Soja et al, 1991).…”