Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do Children Develop Language and Thought?
Examine how a supplied category label changes the information children use. Connect the task to the previous unit’s generalization question while separating inference within a category from learning how to form it.
A question to consider. Why would using a supplied label to predict an animal’s unseen property be insufficient to explain how the child learned the category?
Why this reading
Categories do more than group things that look alike: they can support expectations about unseen properties. Gelman and Markman put category information into conflict with appearance to investigate children’s inferences. Their experiments also ask when a category is relevant to the property being predicted.
Before you read
Induction extends information beyond what has been directly observed. Category membership identifies what kind of thing an object is; perceptual similarity concerns how things appear. Natural kinds here include animal and substance categories. Using a supplied category to infer a property is different from discovering how to form that category.
Read for
- Reconstruct a three-picture problem in which appearance and category membership favor different answers. Explain the purposes of the no-conflict and attributes controls.
- Follow the use of synonymous and broader/narrower labels. What alternative to category-based inference do these comparisons address?
- Compare properties associated with a kind of thing with properties related to visible size or form. How selective are the children’s inferences, and what remains to be learned?
Consider afterwards
- Design two inference questions about the same pair of animals: one for which category membership is informative and another for which appearance matters more. What pattern would show selective use of the category rather than simple repetition of a label?
Editorial context
These studies show that children can use category information even when it conflicts with appearance. They do not show that children disregard appearance, possess adult scientific theories, or independently construct the categories supplied by the experimenter. The authors explicitly distinguish using a category from forming one and leave the origin of the expectation open. Only natural-kind categories were tested, so a special contrast with artifacts is not established by this paper. The restricted preschool samples and familiar language labels bound its generalization.