The child's knowledge of English kin terms

Abstract

Five groups of subjects (three-, four-, five-, and six-year-olds as well as adults) with four males and four females per group were interviewed and questioned with respect to their knowledge of twelve English kin terms: mother, father, sister, brother, daughter, son, wife, husband, aunt, uncle, grandmother, and grandfather. A questionnaire, which in the case of the children was filled out by their parents, helped determine rank orderings for the twelve terms with respect to the estimated relative frequency subjects had: (1) spent with each of the relations;(2) heard the words spoken; and (3) spoken the words. Analyses of the data revealed that: (1) younger children tended to discuss the words in terms of particular people and with reference to personal experience, whereas older children and adults talked in a more general way; (2) the tendency to produce relational definitions of the kin terms was negligible in the preschool years and became increasingly more frequent thereafter; (3) although with age definitions of the kin terms became more accurate, even the definitions of adults were not typically stated in terms of reciprocity; (4) experience as assessed by each of the three sets of parental rankings was successful in predicting both the quality of definitions provided by the children and the order of acquisition of the kin terms, whereas measures of semantic complexity were less successful in doing so.It has often been established that word meanings gradually develop with age (e.g., Vygotsky 1962). In numerous previous studies researchers have * Parts of this paper were presented in a talk entitled 'The child's knowledge of English kin terms' at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research m Child Development,

Resource allocation to kin, friends, and strangers by 3- to 6-year-old children

“…Although previous studies have shown that 3-and 4-year-old children understand kinship terms (Benson & Anglin, 1987) and act more prosocially toward kin than toward nonkin in daily life (de Guzman, Carlo, & Edwards, 2008), children aged 3 and 4 years who were able to match a kinship term with a particular person did not exhibit kin altruism when allocating resources in the current experimental setting. In daily life, children may share more with kin because they are asked to do so by a particular relative such as a parent or sibling.…”

“…Some studies have focused on kinship concepts, showing that children as young as 3 years were able to understand kinship terms (Benson & Anglin, 1987) and that 5-year-olds could explain kin relationships (Benson & Anglin, 1987;Macaskill, 1981). Other studies have investigated how preschoolers came to understand facial resemblance in cuing kinship relationships (Kaminski, Gentaz, & Mazens, 2012) and how young children identified parent-child dyads with similar physical characteristics such as height and skin color and with similar personality traits such as generosity (Springer, 1996;Williams & Smith, 2010).…”

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

“…In the literature on semantic and conceptual development, adulthood is frequently viewed as the developmental end-point where representations of nominal kinds are overwhelmingly organized around defining features (Benson & Anglin, 1987;Keil, 1986;Keil & Batterman, 1984). However, the Yoruba adults in all three groups in the present study did not show anywhere near exclusive use of defining features for most of the concepts.…”

“…The dialectical relationship between the external world and conceptual structure provides an hypothesis. Many researchers agree that natural concepts reflect something of the sociocultural contexts in which they are embedded (Carey, 1985;Keil, 1986;Murphy & Medin, 1985;Seiler & Wannenmacher, 1983). Since neither the individual nor the contexts of which he or she is a part are rigid and unchanging, it follows that any dramatic change in either will be reflected in the pertinent concepts.…”

“…governed concepts, which has been so firmly documented for some concepts in middle-class American children (Carey, 1985;Keil, 1986;Keil & Batterman, 1984), may not prevail in a different culture or even among subgroups within one culture where the immediate material and social conditions do not mirror those of the mainstream. Furthermore, the apparent stability of principled representations in American adults may be more a reflection of the relative stability of their environment and knowledge than the stability of their 'mature' rule-governed concepts per se.…”