Learning relational categories-whose membership is defined not by intrinsic properties but by extrinsic relations with other entities-poses a challenge to young children. The current work showed 3-, 4-to 5-, and 6-year-olds pairs of cards exemplifying familiar relations (e.g., a nest and a bird exemplifying home for) and then tested whether they could extend the relational concept to another category (e.g., choose the barn as a home for a horse). It found that children benefited from (a) hearing a (novel) category name in a relational construction and (b) comparing category members. The youngest group-3-year-olds-learned the category only when given a combination of relational language and a series of comparisons in a progressive alignment sequence.

Children's acquisition of fundamental biological concepts (living thing, animal, plant) is shaped by the way these concepts are named. In English, but not Indonesian, the name "animal" is polysemous: One sense includes all animate objects, and the other excludes humans. Because names highlight object categories, if the same name ("animal") points to two different, hierarchically related biological concepts, children should have difficulty settling on the scope of that term and its close neighbors (e.g., "alive"). Experiments with 4- to 9-year-old English- and Indonesian-speaking children revealed that "alive" poses unique interpretive challenges, especially for English-speaking children. When asked to identify entities that are "alive," older Indonesian-speaking children selected both plants and animals, but their English-speaking counterparts tended to exclude plants, which suggests that they may have misaligned "alive" with one of the "animal" senses. This work underscores the importance of considering language and cultural factors in studying the acquisition of fundamental concepts about the biological world.

Increasing people’s interest and involvement in science is a growing concern in education. Although many researchers and educators seek innovations for classroom instruction, much could be gained by harnessing the activities that people perform at their leisure. Although new media are constantly emerging, comic book reading remains a popular activity for children and adults. Recently, there has been an explosive increase in the creation of educational comic books, including many about science. This rapid increase in science comics far outstrips our understanding of how comics impact people’s beliefs and interests in science. In this theoretical article, we draw on research from cognitive science and education to discuss heretofore unexplored cognitive impacts of science comics. We propose several ways in which learning could be enhanced or impaired through reading science comics and discuss several broader issues related to the use of comic books in education, including individual differences and informal learning.

Children's reasoning about biological concepts is infl uenced not only by their experiences in the natural world and in their classrooms, but also by the way that these concepts are named. In English, 'animal' can refer either to (a) exclusively non-human animals, or (b) all animate beings (human and non-human animals). In Indonesian, this category of animate beings has no dedicated name. Here, we ask whether this diff erence in naming has consequences for children's reasoning about humans and non-human animals. Results from English-and Indonesianspeaking children reveals diff erences in reasoning at age 6, diff erences that become attenuated by age 9. Th ese results suggest that not only naming practices, but also biologically-relevant formal and informal learning experiences, infl uence children's reasoning about biological concepts.

The focus of the present study is on the ways in which storybooks communicate cultural ideals about achievement orientation, and in particular, the role of effort, perseverance, and hard work in fostering successful outcomes. Sixty preschool children's books from Indonesia, Japan, and the United States (20 from each country) were examined for the presence of achievement-oriented themes. These countries were chosen due to previously documented cultural differences in models of learning and individualist/collectivist tendencies that could have some bearing on achievement outcomes. Texts were assessed for (1) the frequency with which “challenge events” appeared in the narratives, (2) whether these events derived from sources internal or external to the main character, and (3) whether solutions relied on the main character individually or included the assistance of others. Results show that Japanese storybooks contained significantly more challenge events than Indonesian storybooks. Compared with Japanese storybooks, American storybooks tended to include a greater proportion of challenges derived from internal qualities of the main character as opposed to external factors. Compared with American storybooks, Japanese storybooks contained a significantly greater proportion of challenges that were solved with individual efforts as opposed to efforts involving the assistance of others. Findings from this study contribute to our understanding of how storybook contexts can provide a rich source of information for young children learning about culturally valued qualities and behaviors related to achievement.