2008
DOI: 10.1080/15475440701542625
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Generic Language in Parent-Child Conversations

Abstract: Generic knowledge concerns kinds of things (e.g., birds fly; a chair is for sitting; gold is a metal). Past research demonstrated that children spontaneously develop generic knowledge by preschool age. The present study examines when and how children learn to use the multiple devices provided by their language to express generic knowledge. We hypothesize that children assume, in the absence of specifying information or context, that nouns refer to generic kinds, as a default. Thus, we predict that (a) Children… Show more

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Cited by 107 publications
(134 citation statements)
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“…By the time children are between 3 to 4 years of age, they produce generics as frequently as adults do-which is not something that is true for all parts of language by a long shot (Gelman et al, 2008). Thirty-month-old toddlers are further able to draw different inferences from generics than from specific statements.…”
Section: Generics In Acquisitionmentioning
confidence: 96%
See 1 more Smart Citation
“…By the time children are between 3 to 4 years of age, they produce generics as frequently as adults do-which is not something that is true for all parts of language by a long shot (Gelman et al, 2008). Thirty-month-old toddlers are further able to draw different inferences from generics than from specific statements.…”
Section: Generics In Acquisitionmentioning
confidence: 96%
“…Toddlers begin to produce generics at approximately 30 months of age, which is the first time that they reliably have the requisite background syntactic capabilities (e.g., sufficiently many words per utterance, plurality, etc; Gelman, 2010;Gelman, Goetz, Sarnecka & Flukes, 2008). By the time children are between 3 to 4 years of age, they produce generics as frequently as adults do-which is not something that is true for all parts of language by a long shot (Gelman et al, 2008).…”
Section: Generics In Acquisitionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…As such, the small interaction with domain is probably best interpreted as due to idiosyncrasies in particular items, though the slightly higher ratings for the arbitrary instance interpretation in the artifact condition than the natural kind is reminiscent of Gelman et al's (2008) finding that indefinite singular generics are used more often for artifacts than animals and thus is potentially worthy of further study. With respect to the Aspect Hypothesis what is most important is the finding that the arbitrary instance interpretation was rated to be better for items involving principled connections than items involving statistical connections in each domain.…”
Section: Connection Type and The Interpretation Of Indefinite Singularsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Further, whether parents selectively produce generic language for categories for which they themselves hold essentialist beliefs has not yet been examined. [There is evidence suggesting that parents and children produce more generic language for animals than for artifacts (33,43,44), which could be due to domain differences in essentialism. However, because there are many differences in the structure of animal and artifact categories, these studies cannot provide definitive evidence of the role of essentialism in the production of generics.…”
mentioning
confidence: 99%