Abstract
Semantically-similar labels that co-occur in child-directed speech (e.g., bunny-rabbit) are more likely to promote inductive generalization in preschoolers than non-co-occurring labels (e.g., lamb-sheep). However, it remains unclear whether this effect stems from co-occurrence or other factors, and how co-occurrence contributes to generalization. To address these issues, preschoolers were exposed to a stream of semantically-similar labels that don’t co-occur in natural language, but were arranged to co-occur in the experimental setting. In Experiment 1, children exposed to the co-occurring stream were more likely to make category-consistent inferences than children in two control conditions. Experiment 2 replicated this effect and provided evidence that co-occurrence training influenced generalization only when the trained labels were categorically-similar. These findings suggest that both co-occurrence information and semantic representations contribute to preschool-age children’s inductive generalization. The findings are discussed in relation to the developmental accounts of inductive generalization.
Highlights
A distinctive feature of human cognition is the ability to make inferences that are based on knowledge of taxonomic hierarchies
Experiment 2 replicated this effect and provided evidence that co-occurrence training influenced generalization only when the trained labels were categorically-similar. These findings suggest that both co-occurrence information and semantic representations contribute to preschool-age children’s inductive generalization
These findings suggest that effects previously reported in the literature (Gelman and Markman, 1986; Fisher et al, 2011; Godwin et al, 2013) can be at least partially attributed to label co-occurrence
Summary
A distinctive feature of human cognition is the ability to make inferences that are based on knowledge of taxonomic hierarchies. Prior research has documented adults’ consistent use of category information in inductive generalization, but a key question concerns the developmental course of this ability (Badger and Shapiro, 2012). Many studies investigating this question have concluded that, similar to adults, young children’s inductive generalizations are based on identifying a common category that includes the presented items (e.g., Gelman and Coley, 1990; Gelman and Medin, 1993; Welder and Graham, 2001; Jaswal, 2004; Booth et al, 2005; Jaswal and Markman, 2007). The stimuli were selected such that visual information alone was insufficient to make the inference and category
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