Inductive reasoning during infancy and early childhood

归纳推理能力的发展是认知发展的基本组成部分。简而言之，归纳推理涉及到调用这样一个前提，即对于一个类别的一个范例为真的事物（例如，蓝球反弹）将对相同类别的其它成员成立（例如，所以所有的球都会反弹）。因此，归纳推理使儿童能够将知识概括为新的实例和新的情况，从而提高认知效率并有机会从过去的经验中受益。在最后一个授予阶段，我们发现，婴儿年仅12个月大的可以归纳推理的新对象。此外，我们发现他们会使用共享对象名称来指导这个过程。 在下一个授予期，我们将探讨归纳能力在婴儿期的发展，并检查语言在引导学龄前儿童对小说类别的归纳推理中的作用。在三组研究中，我们将考察归纳推理能力何时在婴儿期出现（第一组）;探索命名在引导婴儿对非明显物体属性的归纳推理中的影响（第二组）;并考察语言如何帮助学龄前儿童学习物体的哪些属性是特定类别的特征，哪些属性不是（第三组）。这些研究的结果将为这些研究相对不足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和概念知识之间相互作用的理解。

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.