Concepts and Theories in Human Development

描述（由申请人提供）：孩子们如何组织他们对世界的知识？最近，概念的处理发生了转变，从传统的观点认为概念可以用表面特征来表征，到“理论”观点认为概念嵌入在常识解释框架中。儿童的概念与理论联系在一起的发现尤其引人注目，因为它与以前广泛接受的儿童概念“感知上的束缚”的观点背道而驰。相比之下，学龄前儿童期望类别成员分享不明显的相似性，即使面对显著的感知差异，并判断不可见的内部部分对项目的身份和功能至关重要。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的图表，以及幼儿如何解释本质主义的自然语言表达。具体而言，这项工作集中在通用名词短语作为本质主义表达的重要手段。(2)我们研究了概念如何受到两个核心要素的影响：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特征的条件，来调和本质主义与传统的儿童观点，即儿童关注世界的感性方面。竞争性的更新是在过去工作的基础上建立的，通过检查通用语言与分类和本质主义推理联系起来的机制。具体而言，我讨论三个焦点问题：  儿童时期通用语言的概念含义。  如何在结构上不同的语言和不同的文化背景下表达和理解泛型。  类属概念与本质主义信念（包括先天论、因果推理和归纳推理）之间的联系。拟议的研究使用自然主义的语言分析和实验研究与儿童3-10岁，以解决这些问题。具体来说，该提案有三个目标：第一部分图表通用语言如何影响儿童的类别形成，记忆和推理。第二部分考察了两种语言中通用语言的使用和理解，这两种语言在结构上彼此不同，与英语（克丘亚语和西班牙语）也有很大的不同。第三部分考察了类属范畴与其他范畴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项研究将提供关于幼儿期概念，语言和理论构建之间联系的聚合和精确证据。

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.