Unmasking “Alive”: Children's Appreciation of a Concept Linking All Living Things

Abstract

Decades of research have documented in school-aged children a persistent difficulty apprehending an overarching biological concept that encompasses animate entities like humans and non-human animals, as well as plants. This has led many researchers to conclude that young children have yet to integrate plants and animate entities into a concept LIVING THING. However, virtually all investigations have used the word "alive" to probe children's understanding, a term that technically describes all living things, but in practice is often aligned with animate entities only. We show that when "alive" is replaced with less ambiguous probes, children readily demonstrate knowledge of an overarching concept linking plants with humans and non-human animals. This work suggests that children have a burgeoning appreciation of this fundamental biological concept, and that the word "alive" paradoxically masks young children's appreciation of the concept to which it is meant to refer.Keywords conceptual development; children; folkbiology; animacy; science educationThe relation between a word and the concept to which it refers lies at the very heart of successful communication. While often taken for granted, we heavily rely on the shared alignment of words and concepts between speaker and hearer. For example, a hearer will only be able to correctly attribute new information that they hear about "dogs" to all dogs if the word "dog" and concept DOG are aligned. But this alignment is not always perfect. On the one hand, it may be responsive to the context or mode of communication. It is well known that context is an important part of interpretation (Grice, 1957;Levinson, 1983;Sperber & Wilson, 1995; among many others). For example, in an engineering context, "fluid" maps to a concept including both liquids and gases, while in common parlance, it would likely be understood to map to liquids only. Beyond context, there may also be problems with the concept-word mapping itself. Hearers may simply lack the underlying concept corresponding to a particular word, for example, abstract concepts like JUSTICE or ATOM. They may map the word to a different concept than the one intended by the speaker. Or they may have the relevant concept firmly in place, but have not yet aligned it with the corresponding word.The discussion above is more than hypothetical, as misalignments between words and concepts have real consequences for children's learning. In this paper we focus on a particularly important example, the relation between the word "alive" and the concept LIVING THINGa core biological concept that encompasses animate entities like humans and non-human animals, as well as plants. Decades (Carey, 1985;Hatano, Siegler, Richards, Inagaki, Stavy, & Wax, 1993;Klingberg, 1952;Klingensmith, 1953;Laurendeau & Pinard, 1962;Piaget, 1929;Russell & Dennis, 1939;Slaughter, Jaakkola, & Carey, 1999). In contrast, we suggest an alternative interpretation: it is not that this concept eludes children, but rather that they have failed to align the w...

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