The Effects of Naming Practices on Children's Understanding of Living Things

The Effects of Naming Practices on Children’s Understanding of Living Things Florencia K. Anggoro (f-anggoro@northwestern.edu) Sandra R. Waxman (s-waxman@northwestern.edu) Douglas L. Medin (medin@northwestern.edu) Department of Psychology, Northwestern University 2029 Sheridan Rd., Evanston, IL 60208 USA more inclusive concept LIVING THING, one that includes members of both the plant and animal kingdoms, is a rather late and laborious developmental achievement. For example, Piaget (1954) argued that children have an inchoate notion, as witnessed by their tendency to mistakenly attribute animacy to inanimate objects (e.g., clouds, bicycles) that appear to move on their own or exhibit goal-directed behavior). This observation of ‘childhood animism’ led Piaget to assert that children have a very different understanding of fundamental folkbiologic concepts such as ANIMAL and LIVING THING, and have not yet worked out the scope and relations among them. Other examples of this difficulty come from Hatano et al. (1993) who documented that the majority of kindergarteners, second-graders, and fourth-graders from the U.S., Israel, and Japan had difficulty judging that plants as well animals are alive (Hatano et al., 1993). In sum, developmental evidence suggests that several folkbiologic concepts, including LIVING THING, are difficult to acquire, and that this reflects, at least in part, children’s difficulty establishing the scope of each of these concepts and the relations among them. For example, young children have a tendency to attribute animacy to too broad a set of entities (to inanimate objects) and at the same time, a tendency to attribute life to too restricted a set of entities (judging animals, but not plants, to be alive). In this paper we ask why this is the case. To foreshadow, we will suggest that by roughly 6 or 7 years of age, children do appreciate an inclusive concept LIVING THING that includes both plants and animals, and that they reveal this in certain tasks. However, we also argue that they have particular and pointed difficulty working out the scope of the terms for these concepts (e.g., alive, living thing, and animal) and the relations among them. We document in English-speaking children a rather clear difficulty interpreting the term alive and working out its relation to the term animal. We further document that Indonesian-speaking children reveal no such difficulty. More provocatively, we propose that the developmental trajectory for fundamental folkbiologic concepts is rooted in the naming practices and conceptual structure of the communities in which children are raised. Abstract We investigated the development of an understanding of the concept LIVING THING in 4- to 10-year-old monolingual children acquiring either English or Indonesian. In English, LIVING THING is comprised of two major constituent categories, ANIMAL and PLANT. However, the word animal has (at least) two senses, and these overlap in their scope. One sense of animal includes both humans and non-human animals; the other sense excludes humans and includes only non-human animals. In Indonesian, the constituents are organized differently: neither this overlapping category structure nor the polysemous use of animal exists. We consider the consequence of this cross-linguistic difference on acquisition, asking whether underlying category structure, coupled with the polysemy of the word animal, interferes with the acquisition of the concept ALIVE or LIVING THING. Using a Sorting Task, we compared English- and Indonesian-speaking children’s ability to form a category that includes all and only LIVING THINGS. All children successfully formed this inclusive category when they were instructed to sort on the basis of terms like die or grow. Importantly, and as predicted, we found cross-linguistic differences when children were asked to sort the very same objects on the basis of the term alive. English-speaking children performed less well when sorting on the basis of alive than on the basis of the other terms, and indeed tended to include animals, but not plants. In contrast, Indonesian-speaking children showed no such decrement. We suggest that this cross- linguistic developmental difference likely stems from the naming practices and underlying conceptual structure in each respective language community. Introduction Acquisition of Folkbiologic Knowledge A considerable amount of research has been focused on our concepts and reasoning about entities of the biological world. Of particular interest is ‘folkbiologic’ knowledge, or people’s everyday, intuitive knowledge about the biological world. Within the domain of folkbiology, the focus is on identifying people’s mental models of the natural world, examining how experience and goals influence their mental models, and exploring how these models influence reasoning and action (Medin & Atran, 1999; Wellman & Gelman, 1992). Another key focus has been to discover how folkbiologic concepts develop. There is broad consensus across different measures, different lab groups, and different decades of research, that a Living Thing Consider the concept LIVING THING which encompasses all biological entities, both animals and plants.