Children’s interpretation of a label for an individuated object: Dependence on age and ontological kind

Abstract

Three experiments examined whether the experience of individuating an object would affect the way that children of different ages would interpret its label. Participants were asked to remember a novel object and pick it out from sets containing either two similar objects (similar condition) or no similar objects (dissimilar condition). They were then taught a label for the object and tested for how broadly they generalized it. Because children in the similar condition had formed a more detailed representation of the object, they were expected to generalize its label less broadly. For artifacts, this effect was observed in 4- and 5-year-olds as well as first and second graders, but not in 3-year-olds or adults. For toy animals, no age group showed this effect, and the three oldest groups of children showed the opposite effect. Various explanations for why the consequences of individuating an object for the interpretation of its label depend on age of the learner and the object’s ontological kind are discussed.

Grouping affects children’s interpretation of a label for an animal, but not for an artifact

“…The children showed the same pattern of animal label generalization as the first graders in Hartin and Merriman (2016). Thus, for first graders, the predicted effect of group context does not depend on asking the children to distinguish one animal from other animals in the group; the children showed the effect when merely asked to look at the groups of animals.…”

“…The results of an investigation by Hartin and Merriman (2016) are consistent with these proposals for children 5 years and older, although their experiments were not intended to test these proposals. Their experiments were designed to test the so-called detailed representation hypothesis, which is that if children attend to a detail that distinguishes one object from similar objects, they will tend to not generalize a label for the first object to objects that lack that detail.…”

“…Experiment 2 examined 3- and 4-year-olds’ performance. Hartin and Merriman (2016) found no evidence that either of these groups considered the grouping of similar animals to be an invitation to form a category out of them. Experiment 3 addressed potential alternative explanations for the performance of 4-year-olds in Experiment 2.…”

“…Experiment 1 tested first graders (6- and 7-year-olds). Hartin and Merriman (2016) found that this age group generalized a label for an animal more broadly if they had first picked out the animal from similar rather than dissimilar animals. Experiment 2 examined 3- and 4-year-olds’ performance.…”

“…Our paradigm differed from that of Hartin and Merriman (2016) in two important ways. First, it not only included a similar group and a dissimilar group condition, but also included a no group condition in which the target object was encountered by itself several times before the label was introduced for it.…”