How much does a shared name make things similar? Linguistic labels, similarity, and the development of inductive inference.

This article examines the development of inductive generalization, and presents a model of young children's induction and two experiments testing the model. The model specifies contribution of linguistic labels and perceptual similarity to young children's induction and predicts a correspondence between similarity judgment and induction of young children. In Experiment 1, 4- to 5-year-olds, 7- to 8-year-olds, and 11- to 12-year-olds were presented with triads of schematic faces (a Target and two Test stimuli), which varied in perceptual similarity, with one of the Test stimuli sharing a linguistic label with the Target, and another having a different label. Participants were taught an unobservable biological property about the Target and asked to generalize the property to one of the Test stimuli. Although 4- to 5-year-olds' proportions of label-based inductive generalizations varied with the degree of perceptual similarity among the compared stimuli, 11- to 12-year-olds relied exclusively on labels, and 7- to 8-year-olds appeared to be a transitional group. In Experiment 2 these findings were replicated using naturalistic stimuli (i.e., photographs of animals), with perceptual similarity manipulated by "morphing" naturalistic pictures into each other in a fixed number of steps. Overall results support predictions of the model and point to a developmental shift from treating linguistic labels as an attribute contributing to similarity to treating them as markers of a common category-a shift that appears to occur between 8 and 11 years of age.

[1]  J. I.  The Design of Experiments , 1936, Nature.

[2]  E. Gibson.  Principles of Perceptual Learning and Development , 1969 .

[3]  D. Medin.  A theory of context in discrimination learning , 1975 .

[4]  Dedre Gentner,et al.  What looks like a jiggy but acts like a zimbo?: A study of early word meaning using artificial objects , 1978 .

[5]  A. Treisman,et al.  A feature-integration theory of attention , 1980, Cognitive Psychology.

[6]  D. Krantz,et al.  The use of statistical heuristics in everyday inductive reasoning , 1983 .

[7]  J. Birnholz,et al.  The development of human fetal hearing. , 1983, Science.

[8]  R. Nosofsky.  American Psychological Association, Inc. Choice, Similarity, and the Context Theory of Classification , 2022 .

[9]  D. Medin,et al.  The role of theories in conceptual coherence. , 1985, Psychological review.

[10]  Paul C. Quinn,et al.  On Categorization in Early Infancy. , 1986 .

[11]  E. Markman,et al.  Categories and induction in young children , 1986, Cognition.

[12]  R. Shepard,et al.  Toward a universal law of generalization for psychological science. , 1987, Science.

[13]  E. Markman,et al.  Young children's inductions from natural kinds: the role of categories and appearances. , 1987, Child development.

[14]  S. Gelman.  The development of induction within natural kind and artifact categories , 1988, Cognitive Psychology.

[15]  D. Massaro,et al.  Before you see it, you see its parts: Evidence for feature encoding and integration in preschool children and adults , 1989, Cognitive Psychology.

[16]  F. Keil.  Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development , 1989 .

[17]  L. Smith,et al.  A model of perceptual classification in children and adults. , 1989, Psychological review.

[18]  Linda B. Smith.  From global similarities to kinds of similarities: the construction of dimensions in development , 1989 .

[19]  John D. Coley,et al.  Perspectives on language and thought: Language and categorization: The acquisition of natural kind terms , 1991 .

[20]  Kenneth Roberts,et al.  Linguistic versus attentional influences on nonlinguistic categorization in 15-month-old infants , 1991 .

[21]  James P. Byrnes,et al.  Perspectives on language and thought : interrelations in development , 1991 .

[22]  K. Springer,et al.  Children's awareness of the biological implications of kinship. , 1992, Child development.

[23]  D. Gentner,et al.  Respects for similarity , 1993 .

[24]  William K. Estes,et al.  Classification and cognition , 1994 .

[25]  Peter D. Eimas,et al.  Categorization in early infancy and the continuity of development , 1994, Cognition.

[26]  K. Roberts.  Categorical responding in 15-month-olds: Influence of the noun-category bias and the covariation between visual fixation and auditory input , 1995 .

[27]  Linda B. Smith,et al.  Naming in young children: a dumb attentional mechanism? , 1996, Cognition.

[28]  J. Mandler,et al.  Drinking and driving don't mix: inductive generalization in infancy , 1996, Cognition.

[29]  J. Pind.  The Discovery of Spoken Language, Peter W. Jusczyk (Ed.). MIT Press (1997), ISBN 0 262 10058 4 , 1997 .

[30]  S. Waxman,et al.  Do words facilitate object categorization in 9-month-old infants? , 1997, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[31]  C. Sumiyoshi.  CATEGORY BASED INDUCTION , 1997 .

[32]  Frank C Keil,et al.  Do houseflies think? Patterns of induction and biological beliefs in development 1 Portions of this manuscript were presented at the annual meeting of the Psychonomics Society, 1988. 1 , 1998, Cognition.

[33]  Linda B. Smith,et al.  Object Shape, Object Function, and Object Name , 1998 .

[34]  P. D. Eimas,et al.  Evidence for a global categorical representation of humans by young infants. , 1998, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[35]  J. Mandler,et al.  Studies in Inductive Inference in Infancy , 1998, Cognitive Psychology.

[36]  V. Sloutsky,et al.  How much does a shared name make things similar? Part 1. Linguistic labels and the development of similarity judgment. , 1999, Developmental psychology.

[37]  Vladimir M. Sloutsky,et al.  Modality Preference and its Change in the Course of Development , 2001 .