Children's interpretation of generic noun phrases.

Abstract

Generic utterances (e.g., "Cows say 'moo'") have 2 distinctive semantic properties: (a) Generics are generally true, unlike indefinites (e.g., "Bears live in caves" is generic; "I saw some bears in the cave" is indefinite), and (b) generics need not be true of all category members, unlike universal quantifiers (e.g., all, every, each). This article examined whether preschool children and adults appreciate both these features, using a comprehension task (Study 1) and an elicited production task (Study 2). In both tasks, 4-year-old children-like adults-treated generics as distinct from both indefinites ("some") and universal quantifiers ("all"). In contrast, 3-year-olds did not differentiate among generics, "all," and "some." By 4 years of age, generics emerge as a distinct semantic device.

Induction and knowledge-what

“…The fact that sentences (3a) and (3b) express the same content in spite of their very different logical form is a further indication that generics form a special class of sentences. This conclusion is also supported by the fact that generics are acquired earlier by children than explicit universal sentences (Gelman 2003), which indicates that the information contained in generics is of a more fundamental type (see also Hollander et al 2002). Leslie (2008, p. 21) writes: BThus the inclination to generalize, though aided by language, does not depend on language but is, rather, an early developing, presumably innate, cognitive disposition.Ô ur position is that induction does not concern relations between sentences and hence it is not a logical problem involving relations between sentences.…”

“…Information about categories is privileged in memory since children are better able to recall new information about categories than to recall information about non-category sets (Cimpian and Erickson 2012). Furthermore, children find it easier to reason with categories (dogs) than with set-expressions (all dogs) (Hollander et al 2002). Findings of this type indicate that knowledge-what is primary to knowledge-that, just as semantic memory is primary to episodic.…”

Generics Articulate Default Generalizations

“…The results from Hollander et al (2002) and Tardif et al (2011) suggest that, even if young children are able to understand "all" and "some" when used in the context of a small set of items (e.g., "all of these crayons"), they nonetheless have difficulty processing kind-wide quantified statements, and may fall back on their interpretation of the relevant generic instead. However, in the Hollander et al and Tardif et al studies, children had to rely on their background knowledge of the kind to evaluate the kind-wide statements, whereas they had the all the relevant instances before them (e.g., the 6 crayons) when asked to evaluate quantified statements concerning a small set of items.…”

“…In a relatively early study, Michelle Hollander, Susan Gelman, and Jon Star (2002) tested preschoolers' comprehension of kind-wide quantified statements. In their study, 3-and 4-year-olds and adults were asked a number of yes/no questions.…”

Sample diversity and premise typicality in inductive reasoning: Evidence for developmental change

“…All questions referred to categories using generic nouns "e.g., to learn about DOGS." This language choice, as well as the instructions, which referred to learning about kinds of animals, insured that children understood the task as an attempt to learn about a category as a whole, not just the given exemplars, as even preschoolers understand generic noun phrases as referring to categories, not only pictured exemplars or a subset (e.g., Gelman & Raman, 2003;Hollander, Gelman, & Star, 2002). Questions were presented in a separate random order for each participant.…”