Concepts and Theories in Human Development

描述（由申请人提供）：本提案为儿童本质主义推理的研究开辟了两个新的方向。本质主义认为，某些类别有一个决定身份的潜在现实，并对类别成员之间的共性负责。本质主义被认为是一种早期的认知偏见（Gelman, 2003）。幼儿的概念反映了对本质主义的深刻承诺，这导致儿童以许多趋同的方式超越显而易见的东西：当学习单词时，将知识概括为新的类别成员，思考先天与后天的作用，以及构建因果解释。因此，这一框架反对儿童是具体的或专注于明显的标准观点，而是声称儿童有一种早期的、强大的倾向来寻找非明显的特征。本质主义也与儿童完全基于联想学习策略建立他们对世界的知识的说法背道而驰，相反，他们认为儿童的概念根植于丰富的民间理论中。这种竞争性的更新建立在过去的工作基础上，以实现两个目标。第一部分探讨了语言如何作为一种机制，在学龄前儿童中构建和传递本质主义信念。一般的名词短语（例如，蝙蝠在夜间飞行）是用自然语言传达基本概念的重要手段：它们经常出现在父母输入的各种不同的语言中，幼儿很容易学会，幼儿也能适当地理解，并保留在长期记忆中。提出了一项深入的训练研究，将在不同的措辞条件下教幼儿一个新概念，以图表通用和标签对本质主义推理的影响。本节还将研究不同的输入语言对儿童记忆和学习新信息的影响。最后，本节的研究将测试关于泛型学习过程的竞争主张，以及语言影响分类和相似性判断的机制。第2部分考察了本质主义的一个关键假设发展基础：关注对象的历史路径，如起源、所有权和真实性的概念。本文提出了一系列的研究来调查这些核心概念在儿童从学步期到小学的发展。该理论预测，学龄前儿童对历史路径表现出敏锐的敏感性，即使在控制物体的物质特征时，当物品的可取性与历史路径相冲突时，这种判断也会成立。此外，据预测，幼儿会判断物品的来源和所有权赋予其特殊价值，尽管这种信念的范围也会随着年龄的增长而扩大。总的来说，这19项研究将通过自然语言分析和2至10岁儿童的实验研究，为儿童早期概念，语言和理论构建之间的联系提供收敛和精确的证据。公共卫生相关性：对本质主义推理的研究对几个紧迫的公共卫生相关性问题具有直接影响：儿童如何获得和概括知识；促进人类学习的语境（语言和非语言）；儿童如何对疾病、健康和疾病等基本公共卫生问题进行推理；以及对人类多样性的刻板印象和理解的发展。了解这些基本过程是如何在正常发育的儿童中展开的，也为最终理解他们如何在各种疾病中出错提供了一个框架，比如特殊语言障碍或卡普格拉综合征。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This proposal launches two new directions in the study of essentialist reasoning in children. Essentialism is the idea that certain categories have an underlying reality that determines identity and is responsible for commonalities among category members. Essentialism is argued to be an early cognitive bias (Gelman, 2003). Young children's concepts reflect a deep commitment to essentialism, which leads children to look beyond the obvious in many converging ways: when learning words, generalizing knowledge to new category members, contemplating the role of nature versus nurture, and constructing causal explanations. This framework thus argues against the standard view of children as concrete or focused on the obvious, instead claiming that children have an early, powerful tendency to search for non-obvious features. Essentialism also runs counter to claims that children build up their knowledge of the world wholly based on associative learning strategies, arguing instead that children's concepts are embedded in rich folk theories. This competing renewal builds on past work to address two aims. Part 1 examines how language serves as a mechanism for constructing and transmitting essentialist beliefs in preschool-aged children. Generic noun phrases (e.g., Bats fly at night) are a vital means of conveying essentialist concepts in natural language: they are frequent in parental input across widely distinct languages, are readily learned by young children, are understood appropriately by young children, and are retained in long-term memory. An in-depth training study is proposed that will teach young children a new concept under varied wording conditions, to chart the effects of generics and labeling on essentialist reasoning. This section will also examine the implications of different input language for children's memory for and learning of new information. Finally, studies in this section will test competing claims regarding the process by which generics are learned, and the mechanisms by which language affects categorization and similarity judgments. Part 2 examines one key hypothesized developmental underpinning of essentialism: attention to the historical path of objects, as manifest in concepts of origins, ownership, and authenticity. A series of studies is proposed to investigate the development of these core concepts in children from toddler age through elementary school. The theory predicts that preschool children will display keen sensitivity to historical path, and that such judgments will hold even when controlling for material features of objects, and when item desirability is placed in conflict with historical path. Furthermore, young children are predicted to judge that origins and ownership transmit special value to objects, although the scope of this belief is also predicted to broaden with age. Altogether, these 19 studies will provide converging and precise evidence regarding the links among concepts, language, and theory construction in early childhood, using naturalistic language analyses and experimental studies with children 2 to 10 years of age. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Research on essentialist reasoning has direct implications for several issues of urgent public health relevance: how children acquire and generalize knowledge; the contexts (linguistic and non-linguistic) that foster human learning; how children reason about fundamental public health issues such as disease, health, and illness; and the development of stereotyping and understanding of human diversity. Understanding how these basic processes unfold in normally developing children also provides a framework for eventually understanding how they can go awry in various disorders, such as Specific Language Impairment or Capgras syndrome.