Journal
COGNITION
Volume 110, Issue 1, Pages 1-22Publisher
ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2008.08.005
Keywords
Concepts; Generics; Cognitive development; Conceptual development; Animals; Artifacts; Domain specificity; Naive theories
Categories
Funding
- NICHD NIH HHS [R01 HD036043-07, HD 36043, R01 HD036043, R01 HD036043-06, R56 HD036043, R01 HD036043-08] Funding Source: Medline
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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 and 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. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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