Concepts and Theories in Human Development

人类发展的概念和理论

• 批准号: 6897824
• 负责人: Susan A. Gelman
• 金额: $ 20.16万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN AT ANN ARBOR
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 1998
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1998-09-30 至 2007-04-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/6897824
• 关键词: behavioral /social science research tag; belief; child psychology; clinical research; concept; human subject; language; language development; middle childhood (6-11); nonEnglish language; perception; preschool child (1-5); psycholinguistics; semantics; speech

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): How do children organize their knowledge about the world? Recently there has been a shift in the treatment of concepts, from traditional views assuming that concepts can be characterized by superficial features, to "theory" views treating concepts as embedded in commonsense explanatory frameworks. The finding that children's concepts are tied to theories is especially striking, as it runs counter to a previously widely accepted view of children's concepts as "perceptually bound." In contrast, preschoolers expect category members to share nonobvious similarities, even in the face of salient perceptual dissimilarities, and judge non-visible internal parts to be especially crucial to the identity and functioning of an item. In a sense, very young children act as if members of a category share an underlying "essence". In the prior funding period, my collaborators and I addressed three goals: (1) We charted how essentialist beliefs are expressed in natural language by young children (ages 2-4 years), and how natural language expressions of essentialism are interpreted by young children. Specifically, this work focused on generic noun phrases as a vital means of essentialist expression. (2) We examined how concepts are influenced by two core essentialist components: unobservable causes and ontologies. (3) We sought to reconcile essentialism with the traditional view of children as focused on perceptual aspects of the world, by clarifying the conditions that lead to different profiles of performance. The competing renewal builds on the past work by examining the mechanisms by which generic language links to categorization and essentialist reasoning. Specifically, I address three focal issues:  the conceptual implications of generic language during childhood.  how generics are expressed and understood across structurally distinct languages and different cultural contexts.  the links between generic concepts and essentialist beliefs (including nativism, causal reasoning, and inductive reasoning). The proposed research uses naturalistic language analyses and experimental studies with children 3-10 years of age to address these questions. Specifically, the proposal has three aims: Part 1 charts how generic language influences children's category formation, memory, and reasoning. Part 2 examines the use and comprehension of generic language in two languages that are structurally very different from one another and from English (Quechua and Spanish). Part 3 examines how the distinction between generic kinds and other sorts of categories reflects and influences children's essentialist reasoning. Altogether, these 27 studies will provide converging and precise evidence regarding the links among concepts, language, and theory construction in early childhood.

描述（由申请人提供）：儿童如何组织他们对世界的认识？最近，在概念的处理上发生了转变，从传统观点假设概念可以用表面特征来表征，到“理论”观点将概念视为嵌入在常识性解释框架中的。儿童的概念与理论联系在一起的发现尤其引人注目，因为它与之前广泛接受的儿童概念是“感知束缚”的观点背道而驰。相比之下，学龄前儿童期望类别成员具有非明显的相似性，即使面对显著的感知差异，并且认为不可见的内部部分对项目的身份和功能特别重要。从某种意义上说，非常年幼的孩子表现得好像一个类别的成员共享一个潜在的“本质”。在之前的资助期间，我和我的合作者解决了三个目标：(1)我们绘制了幼儿（2-4岁）如何用自然语言表达本质主义信仰的图表，以及幼儿如何解释本质主义的自然语言表达。具体来说，这篇文章关注的是作为本质主义表达重要手段的名词类短语。(2)我们研究了概念如何受到两个核心本质主义成分的影响：不可观察的原因和本体论。(3)我们试图通过澄清导致不同表现的条件，调和本质主义与儿童关注世界感性方面的传统观点。竞争的更新建立在过去的工作，通过检查机制，通用语言链接到分类和本质主义推理。具体来说，我解决三个焦点问题：儿童时期通用语言的概念含义。泛型是如何在结构不同的语言和不同的文化背景中表达和理解的。一般概念和本质主义信仰（包括本土主义、因果推理和归纳推理）之间的联系。该研究采用自然语言分析和对3-10岁儿童的实验研究来解决这些问题。具体来说，该建议有三个目的：第一部分描绘了通用语言如何影响儿童的类别形成、记忆和推理。第2部分考察了两种语言（克丘亚语和西班牙语）中通用语言的使用和理解，这两种语言在结构上彼此非常不同，也与英语（克丘亚语和西班牙语）不同。第三部分探讨了一般种类和其他种类类别之间的区别如何反映和影响儿童的本质主义推理。总之，这27项研究将为儿童早期概念、语言和理论建构之间的联系提供收敛和精确的证据。