Drinking and driving don't mix: inductive generalization in infancy

Advancing Downward to the Basic Level

“…The available choices can be more or less related to the modeled act, and so the objects the infants choose provide information about what they have understood. For example, when we modeled a dog drinking from a cup and then gave infants the cup along with another animal and a vehicle, they almost always used the other animal for their imitations (Mandler & McDonough, 1996). This finding indicates that they understood that animals drink but vehicles do not.…”

“…In our most recent series of experiments investigating concept formation in infancy, we used a generalized imitation technique (Mandler & McDonough, 1996, 1998bMcDonough & Mandler, 1998; see also Bauer & Dow, 1994). We model a simple event using small replicas of real-world objects and encourage infants to imitate what they have observed.…”

“…For example, Bauer and Thal (1990) found that 21-month-olds were less likely to imitate when event sequences were modeled in the incorrect order and when they did imitate they often reproduced the sequences in the correct order instead. Mandler and McDonough (1996) found that 14-month-olds rarely would imitate incorrect actions such as giving a car a drink or keying a dog; they would imitate the experimenter doing an appropriate action on an unfamiliar exemplar of a class (e.g., giving an aardvark a drink), but would not do something inappropriate to the class.…”

Understanding spatial relations: Flexible infants, lexical adults

“…From the point of view of language acquisition, crosslinguistic studies of early language show that young children everywhere talk about simple events in which animate agents act on inanimate objects (e.g., Brown, 1973;Slobin, 1973Slobin, , 1985. Congruent with this finding, developmental research has shown that preverbal concepts of animacy, inanimacy, and agency begin to be formulated in the first year of life, as well as concepts of the events in which objects take part (Johnson, Slaughter, & Carey, 1998;Legerstee, 1992;Mandler & McDonough, 1996;Spelke, Phillips, & Woodward, 1995). These abstract characterizations of events provide a conceptual base onto which simple sentence structure can be mapped (Mandler, 1996).…”

“…A good deal of research has begun to flesh out the concepts preverbal infants have formed about animate and inanimate objects (e.g., Mandler & McDonough, 1996, 2000, but the concepts onto which spatial language is mapped have remained more speculative. Perhaps the best known approach was that of the Clarks (Clark, E., 1973;Clark, H., 1973), who assumed that there are cognitive universals that account not only for commonalities in spatial terms across various languages but also for the easy acquisition of simple spatial prepositions.…”