Memory for generic and quantified sentences in Spanish-speaking children and adults

Abstract

Generic language ( Owls eat at night) expresses knowledge about categories and may represent a cognitively default mode of generalization. English-speaking children and adults more accurately recall generic than quantified sentences ( All owls eat at night) and tend to recall quantified sentences as generic. However, generics in English are shorter than quantified sentences, and may be better recalled for this reason. The present study provided a new test of the issue in Spanish, where generics are expressed with an additional linguistic element not found in certain quantified sentences ( Los búhos comen de noche 'Owls eat at night' [generic] vs. Muchos búhos comen de noche 'Many owls eat at night' [quantified]). Both preschoolers and adults recalled generics more accurately than quantified sentences, and quantified sentences were more often recalled as generic than the reverse. These findings provide strong additional evidence for generics as a cognitive default, in an understudied cultural context.

The Privileged Status of Category Representations in Early Development

“…Children's memory for information about categories is also superior to their memory for broad quantified sets. Three‐ and 4‐year‐olds who were provided with facts about categories (e.g., that SPIDERS shed their skin) and quantified sets (e.g., that all/most spiders shed their skin) were generally able to remember the category facts as such, but misremembered many of the quantified facts as being about categories . The difference was not due to a shallow reason, such as an inability to remember the extra word in the quantified sentences (i.e., the quantifier).…”

Précis of Social Perception and Social Reality: Why accuracy dominates bias and self-fulfilling prophecy

“…In this case, the evidence Jussim presents seems consistent with the idea that stereotypes are largely accurate. While that may be so, committing to a definition of stereotypes as statistical beliefs about groups may be problematic for another reason: A recent (yet already widely replicated) finding in the literature on concepts suggests that people often have difficulty reasoning withmanipulating, basing inferences on, etc.statistical knowledge about categories (e.g., Gelman et al 2016;Hampton 2012;Hollander et al 2002;Jönsson & Hampton 2006;Khemlani et al 2012;Leslie et al 2011;Leslie & Gelman 2012;Meyer et al 2011). In many circumstances, people tend to fall back on using generic representations, consistent with theoretical arguments that such representations are an easy "default" when reasoning about categories (e.g., Cimpian & Erickson 2012;Gelman 2003;Leslie 2008).…”

The Psychology of Natural Kind Terms

“…Inducing beliefs that a category is a natural kind even leads people to describe it using more generics (Rhodes et al, 2012). And this type of input is ubiquitous: Generics are frequent in parent-child conversations (Gelman, Goetz, Sarnecka, & Flukes, 2008;Graham, Nayer, & Gelman, 2011) and-like natural kind concepts-across languages (Pirahã: Everett, 2009; Spanish: Gelman, Sánchez Tapia, & Leslie, 2016;Quechua: Mannheim, Gelman, Escalante, Huayhua, & Puma, 2010;Mandarin: Tardif, Gelman, Fu, & Zhu, 2012). Thus, children hear knowledgeable speakers use generics to communicate their natural kind beliefs in their daily lives, and hearing categories described with generics triggers the formation of natural kind beliefs.…”