Developmental changes in the representation of word meaning: Cross‐cultural findings

Abstract

AThis study examined semantic and conceptual development among three socioeconomic groups in western Nigeria: rural, urban and ilite. The sociocultural and material conditions typifying each group were hypothesized to be associated with different patterns of conceptual change. All three groups demonstrated a developmental shift in the representation of word meaning, from representations based more on characteristic features, to those based more on defining features. However, the patterns of development differed across groups. The rural group had the most marked shift and the urban group the least. The differences in developmental patterns were interpreted as reflecting specific aspects of each group's sociocultural milieu.

How much does schooling influence general intelligence and its cognitive components? A reassessment of the evidence.

“…Jeyifous' (1985) study raises doubts about the importance of schooling for either type of shift, when the experimental stimuli are culturally relevant and subjects have had personal exposure to them. Related findings from cross-cultural research have prompted others to conclude that an important mechanism through which schooling influences intellectual development is by promoting a disembedded manner of cognizing that is not yoked to direct personal experience (Cole & Scribner, 1974; Rogoff, 1981a, 1981b; Schliemann & Acioly, 1989).…”

“…There is also some unpublished research dealing with the identity-preserving shift (natural objects remain inherently untransformed by surface changes). Jeyifous (1985) demonstrated in her doctoral research that developments in both of these areas occur among the Yoruba of Western Nigeria, regardless of their schooling.…”

I. Introduction

“…For example, Keil's (1989) transformation and discovery studies found that, even in the case of species fixation, middle-class North American children did not possess a robust understanding of the causal role of birth parentage until age 7 to 9: Told that a raccoon gave birth to a certain animal and that this animal subsequently gave birth to more raccoons did not lead children to judge that the animal was a raccoon if it looked and acted like a skunk. This finding was replicated among rural and urban Yoruba children by Jeyifous (1992).…”

Conservation of species, volume, and belief in patients with Alzheimer's disease: The issue of domain specificity and conceptual impairment

“…Researchers have therefore tended to focus on children and young adults or on members of non-Western societies whose intuitive biology may be qualitatively different from that of young adults in the West. While developmental psychologists still disagree about the precise timetable of particular conceptual acquisitions in early childhood, there is consensus that, at least by late adolescence, children in a variety of social contexts construct an intuitive biology with this kind of essentialist understanding of animal kind (Astuti, Solomon, & Carey, 2004; Bloch, Solomon, & Carey, 2001; Jeyifous, 1992; Medin & Atran, 2004). What we do not know is what happens to it once it has been acquired.…”