Fiction presents a unique challenge to the developing child, in that children must learn when to generalize information from stories to the real world. This study examines how children acquire causal knowledge from storybooks, and whether children are sensitive to how closely the fictional world resembles reality. Preschoolers (N = 108) listened…

Four experiments investigated 3-year-olds' understanding of the differential importance of shape for categorizing solid objects. Found that they categorized rigid and deformable objects differently in a non-naming task and knew that material was important for deformable items and shape for rigid items. In two naming tasks, they generalized names…

Examined influence of object labels and shape similarity on 16- to 21-month-olds' inferences. Found that infants generalized non-obvious property of unlabeled objects to test objects with highly similar shapes. For objects labeled with novel nouns, infants relied on shape similarity and shared labels to generalize properties. For objects labeled…

Two experiments tested a model of young children's induction that specified contributions of linguistic labels and perceptual similarity to children's induction. Results support model predictions and point to a developmental shift, from treating linguistic labels as an attribute contributing to similarity to treating them as markers of a common…

Three studies examined lexical categorization in 2-year- olds. Findings indicated that even with minimal opportunities to familiarize themselves with novel artifacts, children generalized their names in accordance with the objects' functions, even when they had to discover the functions on their own or when all the test objects had some…

This study tested three hypothesized mechanisms through which explanations might facilitate problem-solving strategy generalization in kindergarteners through second graders. Results suggested that explanations facilitated generalization through the creation of novel goal structures that enabled children to persist in use of the new strategy…

Examined preschoolers' ability to map novel adjectives to object properties in two experiments. Found that 4-year-olds could extend novel adjectives from target to matching test object whether objects were drawn from same, or different, basic level categories. If 3-year-olds' first extended a novel adjective to objects in the same basic level…

Evaluates some possible reasons for the occurrence and eventual correction of children's naming errors in an experiment in which two-, four-, and six-year-olds learned two artificial object names in succession. (HOD)

Three studies explored whether children's tendency to extend object names on the basis of sameness of shape (shape bias) is specific to naming. Findings indicated that 2- and 3-year-olds showed shape bias both when asked to extend a novel name and when asked to select an object of the same kind as a target object; 3-year-olds also showed shape…

The research literature on children's production of elaborations in associative learning tasks is reviewed, especially with respect to the questions of when children can produce elaborations under instruction, when they transfer elaborative strategy usage from one situation to another, and when they produce elaborative strategies spontaneously.…