Differences in preschoolers’ and adults’ use of generics about novel animals and artifacts: A window onto a conceptual divide

Abstract

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 2-3: 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.Generic noun phrases (e.g., Birds fly) have been hypothesized to "provide a window onto human concepts" (Gelman & Tardif, 1998, p. 215). By referring to a category as an abstract whole (birds in general as opposed to any particular bird or birds), generics express generalizations about shared properties of category members. Research demonstrates that both children and adults produce significantly more generics for categories within the domain of animals than for those within the domain of artifacts (e.g., Gelman, Coley, Rosengren, Hartman, & Pappas, 1998;Gelman, Goetz, Sarnecka, & Flukes, 2008;Gelman & Tardif, 1998;Goldin-Meadow, Gelman, & Mylander, 2005). However, why this pattern is found is unclear.Some have proposed that the animacy bias in generics may reflect a broad differentiation between animal and artifact concepts. For example, animal concepts are more likely to be richly structured and essentialized than artifact concepts (e.g., Gelman, 2003). On this view, the greater proportion of generics in conversation regarding animals may reflect fundamental differences in how these concepts are structured. However, one alternative hypothesis is that this bias may instead reflect lower-level differences in children's familiarity with or generic knowledge base about the particular animal versus artifact categories being discussed (e.g., dogs versus chairs): children may simply know more generic information about specific, basiclevel animal kinds than about specific, basic-level artifact kinds. For example, they may have learned numerous generic properties of dogs (e.g., Dogs have fur, four legs, cold noses; Dogs bark, wag their tails, dig for bones, retrieve sticks) but few generic properties of chairs (e.g., Chairs are for sitting; Chairs have legs and a seat). The current experiments aim to test the Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Amanda C. Brandone, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, 530 Church Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109. Email: Brandone@umich.edu. 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 t...

Reasoning about Instrumental and Communicative Agency in Human Infancy

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Cultural transmission of social essentialism

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“…In contrast, children should assume that the boundaries of new artifact categories are relatively subjective and graded, and thus, assign category membership more flexibly. No prior work, however, has examined whether children’s ontological intuitions guide how children view the boundaries of new categories (see Barrett, Abdi, & Murphy, 1993; Booth & Waxman, 2002; Brandone & Gelman, 2009; Greif, Kemler-Nelson, Keil, & Guitierrez, 2006; for related work). Thus, it remains unclear whether ontological intuitions shape how children learn about categories, or alternately, whether these intuitions develop only after children have specific experiences with or knowledge about particular categories (e.g., after repeated experiences seeing birds categorized in a uniform way and tools categorized more variably).…”