This study explores how feature salience and feature centrality influence inductive generalization in 4- and 5-year-old children and adults. Recent reports indicate that enhancing the salience of a feature--specifically, a creature's head--by making it move shifts children's inductions so that they ignore labels and make inferences that are…

The authors conducted three experiments examining the effect of grouping on children's generalization of animal labels. In Experiment 1 (N = 96), first graders (M age = 6 years, 10 months) who had seen a novel animal grouped with similar animals generalized its trained label more broadly than those who had seen it by itself or grouped with…

This study explores the role of a particular social cue--the "sequence" of demonstrated actions and events--in preschooler's categorization. A demonstrator sorted objects that varied on both a surface feature (color) and a nonobvious property (sound made when shaken). Children saw a sequence of actions in which the nonobvious property…

Three experiments examined whether the experience of individuating an object would affect the way that children of different ages would interpret its label. Participants were asked to remember a novel object and pick it out from sets containing either two similar objects (similar condition) or no similar objects (dissimilar condition). They were…

It is unclear how children learn labels for multiple overlapping categories such as "Labrador," "dog," and "animal." Xu and Tenenbaum (2007a) suggested that learners infer correct meanings with the help of Bayesian inference. They instantiated these claims in a Bayesian model, which they tested with preschoolers and…

We investigated whether preschool children with specific language impairment (SLI) exhibit the shape bias in word learning: the bias to generalize based on shape rather than size, color, or texture in an object naming context ("This is a wek; find another wek") but not in a non-naming similarity classification context ("See this?…

Under what conditions will people generalize and remember observed social information? Preschool- (n = 44) and young school-age (n = 46) children and adults (n = 40) heard short vignettes describing characters' actions and motives on a single occasion. Characters were introduced using either proper names or category labels. Test questions asked…

Prior research suggests that preschoolers can generalize object properties based on category information conveyed by semantically-similar labels. However, previous research did not control for co-occurrence probability of labels in natural speech. The current studies re-assessed children's generalization with semantically-similar labels.…

Adults, preschool children, and nonhuman primates detect and categorize food objects according to substance information, conveyed primarily by color and texture. In contrast, they perceive and categorize artifacts primarily by shape and rigidity. The present experiments investigated the origins of this distinction. Using a looking time procedure,…

Examined the possibility that knowledge about hierarchical organization of categories and cross-language equivalents for object labels can help children limit use of the assumption that nouns pick out mutually exclusive object categories. Findings suggest that even preschoolers use knowledge about language and categorization to fine tune the…

Three experiments examined factors influencing whether young children consider function, as opposed to appearance or shape, when extending names of novel artifacts. Findings indicated that 4-year-olds extend names based on demonstrated function more often when that function provides a plausible causal account of perceptible object structure, when…

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…

Three preschoolers performed four sorts with stimulus cards--an untaught target sort and three directly taught alternating sorts considered to self-instruct the target performance. Accuracy increased first in the skill sorts and then in the untaught target sorts. All subjects generalized to new target sorts. Correct spontaneous self-instructions…

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…