Concepts and Theories in Human Development

描述(由申请者提供)：孩子们如何组织他们对世界的知识？最近，对概念的处理发生了转变，从传统的认为概念可以由表面特征来表征的观点，转变为将概念视为嵌入常识解释框架的“理论”观点。儿童的概念与理论联系在一起，这一发现尤其令人震惊，因为这与之前被广泛接受的儿童概念是“感知受限”的观点背道而驰。相比之下，学龄前儿童希望类别成员有不明显的相似之处，即使面对显著的知觉差异，并判断不可见的内部部分对物品的身份和功能尤为关键。在某种意义上，非常年幼的儿童表现得好像某个类别的成员共享一个潜在的“本质”。在之前的资助期间，我和我的合作者提出了三个目标：(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念，以及幼儿如何解释本质主义的自然语言表达。具体地说，这项工作侧重于将通用名词短语作为本质主义表达的重要手段。(2)我们考察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)通过澄清导致不同表现的条件，我们试图调和本质主义与儿童的传统观点，即专注于世界的感性方面。这种竞争性的更新建立在过去工作的基础上，通过检查类属语言与分类和本质主义推理的联系的机制。具体地说，我讨论了三个重点问题：儿童时期通用语言的概念含义。如何在结构不同的语言和不同的文化背景下表达和理解泛型。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。这项研究通过对3-10岁儿童的自然语言分析和实验研究来解决这些问题。具体地说，该建议有三个目标：第一部分绘制了类属语言如何影响儿童的类别形成、记忆和推理。第2部分考察了两种在结构上截然不同的语言以及英语(克丘亚语和西班牙语)中对通用语言的使用和理解。第三部分考察了类属类别与其他类别之间的区别如何反映和影响儿童的本质主义推理。总而言之，这27项研究将为儿童早期概念、语言和理论构建之间的联系提供集中和准确的证据。

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.