Inductive reasoning during infancy and early childhood

归纳推理能力的发展是认知发展的一个基本组成部分。简而言之，归纳推理涉及引用这样的假设，即对于类别的一个样本(例如，蓝色球反弹)为真的事情将对于相同类别的其他成员(例如，因此所有的球都反弹)也是真的。因此，归纳推理允许儿童将知识概括到新的情况和新的情景中，从而提高认知效率，并有机会从过去的经验中受益。在最后的授权期内，我们发现12个月大的婴儿就能对新奇物体进行归纳推理。此外，我们发现他们会使用共享对象名称来指导这一过程。在下一个授权期内，我们将探索婴儿期归纳能力的发展，并研究语言在引导学龄前儿童对新类别的归纳推理中的作用。在三组研究中，我们将考察婴儿时期何时出现归纳推理能力(组1)；探索命名在指导婴儿对不明显的物体属性进行归纳推理中的影响(组2)；以及考察语言如何帮助学龄前儿童了解物体的哪些属性是特定类别的特征，哪些属性不是(组3)。这些研究的结果将对这些相对较少被研究的发展现象提供重要的见解，并将促进我们对早期发展中语言知识和概念知识之间的相互作用的理解。

The development of the ability to reason inductively is a fundamental component of cognitive development. Put, briefly, inductive reasoning involves invoking the premise that things that are true for one exemplar of a category (e.g., the blue ball bounces) will hold true for other members of the same category (e.g., therefore all balls bounce). Thus, inductive reasoning allows children to generalize knowledge to new instances and new situations, resulting in increased cognitive efficiency and the opportunity to benefit from past experiences. During the last granting period, we discovered that infants as young as 12-months of age can reason inductively about novel objects. Moreover, we found that they would use shared object names to guide this process.   During the next granting period, we will explore the development of inductive abilities during infancy, and examine the role of language in guiding preschoolers' inductive inferences about novel categories. In three sets of studies, we will examine when inductive reasoning abilities emerge during infancy (Set 1);  explore the influence of naming in guiding infants' inductive inferences about nonobvious object properties (Set 2); and  examine the how language can help preschoolers learn which properties of objects are characteristic of a particular category and which properties are not (Set 3). The results of the proposed studies will offer important insights into these relatively understudied developmental phenomena and will advance our understanding of the interaction between linguistic and conceptual knowledge in early development.