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，归纳推理涉及到援引一个前提，即对一个类别的一个范例为真（例如，蓝色的球会弹跳）的事情对同一类别的其他成员也将成立（例如，因此所有的球都会弹跳）。因此，归纳推理允许儿童将知识推广到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。在最后一个授权期间，我们发现12个月大的婴儿就可以对新事物进行归纳推理。此外，我们发现它们将使用共享对象名称来指导此过程。在接下来的研究阶段，我们将探讨幼儿时期归纳能力的发展，并探讨语言在引导幼儿对新类别进行归纳推理中的作用。在三组研究中，我们将检查归纳推理能力在婴儿期何时出现（组1）；探索命名对引导幼儿对非明显物体属性进行归纳推理的影响（集2）；并研究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（集合3）。本研究的结果将为这些相对未被充分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.