Development of category-based induction and semantic knowledge.

Category-based induction is a hallmark of mature cognition; however, little is known about its origins. This study evaluated the hypothesis that category-based induction is related to semantic development. Computational studies suggest that early on there is little differentiation among concepts, but learning and development lead to increased differentiation based on taxonomic relatedness. This study reports findings from a new task aimed to (a) examine this putative increase in semantic differentiation and (b) test whether individual differences in semantic differentiation are related to category-based induction in 4- to 7-year-old children (N = 85). The results provide the first empirical evidence of an age-related increase in differentiation of representations of animal concepts and suggest that category-based induction is related to increased semantic differentiation.

[1]  K. Nelson,et al.  Variations in children's concepts by age and category. , 1974, Child development.

[2]  Robert S. Siegler,et al.  Revisiting preschoolers’ living things concept: A microgenetic analysis of conceptual change in basic biology , 2004, Cognitive Psychology.

[3]  V. Jaswal,et al.  Don't believe everything you hear: preschoolers' sensitivity to speaker intent in category induction. , 2004, Child development.

[4]  Michael C. Hout,et al.  The versatility of SpAM: a fast, efficient, spatial method of data collection for multidimensional scaling. , 2013, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[5]  D. Howard,et al.  A Multidimensional Scaling Analysis of the Development of Animal Names. , 1977 .

[6]  Ann L. Brown,et al.  Melting chocolate and melting snowmen: Analogical reasoning and causal relations , 1990, Cognition.

[7]  Patrick Shafto,et al.  Development of categorization and reasoning in the natural world: novices to experts, naive similarity to ecological knowledge. , 2003, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[8]  Vladimir M Sloutsky,et al.  Carrot Eaters or Moving Heads , 2012, Psychological science.

[9]  D. Gentner.  Metaphor as Structure Mapping: The Relational Shift. , 1988 .

[10]  Anna V Fisher,et al.  Linguistic labels: conceptual markers or object features? , 2012, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[11]  Eve V. Clark,et al.  WHAT'S IN A WORD? ON THE CHILD'S ACQUISITION OF SEMANTICS IN HIS FIRST LANGUAGE , 1973 .

[12]  S. Carey.  Conceptual Change in Childhood , 1985 .

[13]  Eli Saltz,et al.  The development of natural language concepts. , 1972 .

[14]  S. Gelman,et al.  The Essential Child : Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought , 2003 .

[15]  S. Gelman,et al.  The importance of knowing a dodo is a bird: Categories and infer - ences in two - year olds , 1990 .

[16]  Peter B. Henderson,et al.  Inductive reasoning , 2003, SGCS.

[17]  Edward E. Smith,et al.  The Tree of Life: Universal and Cultural Features of Folkbiological Taxonomies and Inductions , 1997, Cognitive Psychology.

[18]  B. Ross,et al.  Category vs. Object Knowledge in Category-based Induction. , 2010, Journal of memory and language.

[19]  Anna V Fisher,et al.  What's in the name? Or how rocks and stones are different from bunnies and rabbits. , 2010, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[20]  V. Sloutsky,et al.  Similarity, Induction, Naming, and Categorization (SINC): Generalization or Inductive Reasoning? Reply to Heit and Hayes (2005) , 2005 .

[21]  Karrie E. Godwin,et al.  The Influence of Co-Occurrence and Inheritance Information on Children's Inductive Generalization , 2011, CogSci.

[22]  J. Coley.  The Human Animal: Developmental Changes in Judgments of Taxonomic and Psychological Similarity among Humans and Other Animals , 2007 .

[23]  Michelene T. H. Chi,et al.  How Inferences about Novel Domain-Related Concepts Can Be Constrained by Structured Knowledge. , 1989 .

[24]  T. Landauer,et al.  A Solution to Plato's Problem: The Latent Semantic Analysis Theory of Acquisition, Induction, and Representation of Knowledge. , 1997 .

[25]  D Kelemen,et al.  Domain-specific knowledge in simple categorization tasks , 1994, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[26]  Will Lowe.  Semantic Representation and Priming in a Self-organizing Lexicon , 1997, NCPW.

[27]  Thomas T. Hills,et al.  Categorical structure among shared features in networks of early-learned nouns , 2009, Cognition.

[28]  T. Prescott,et al.  Continuity and change in the development of category structure: Insights from the semantic fluency task , 2003 .

[29]  Michelene T. H. Chi,et al.  How knowledge is structured and used by expert and novice children , 1986 .

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

[31]  Patrick Shafto,et al.  Knowledge and Category-Based Induction. , 2005 .

[32]  R. Goldstone.  An efficient method for obtaining similarity data , 1994 .

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

[34]  D L Medin,et al.  Expertise and category-based induction. , 2000, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[35]  S. Waxman,et al.  Looking Beyond Looks , 2007, Psychological science.

[36]  Will Lowe,et al.  Meaning and the Mental Lexicon , 1997, IJCAI.

[37]  Edward E. Smith,et al.  Category-Based Induction , 1990 .

[38]  V. Sloutsky,et al.  When induction meets memory: evidence for gradual transition from similarity-based to category-based induction. , 2005, Child development.

[39]  Yuko Munakata,et al.  Becoming self-directed: Abstract representations support endogenous flexibility in children , 2010, Cognition.

[40]  Will Lowe.  What is the Dimensionality of Human Semantic Space? , 2000, NCPW.

[41]  S. Graham,et al.  The influence of shape similarity and shared labels on infants' inductive inferences about nonobvious object properties. , 2001, Child development.

[42]  David H. Rakison,et al.  Developing knowledge of objects' motion properties in infancy , 2005, Cognition.

[43]  S. Gelman,et al.  Children's inductive inferences within superordinate categories: the role of language and category structure. , 1988, Child development.

[44]  V. Sloutsky,et al.  Induction and categorization in young children: a similarity-based model. , 2004, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

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

[46]  James L. McClelland,et al.  Semantic Cognition: A Parallel Distributed Processing Approach , 2004 .

[47]  Karrie E. Godwin,et al.  Semantic similarity of labels and inductive generalization: Taking a second look , 2011, Cognition.

[48]  D. Medin,et al.  Categorization and Reasoning among Tree Experts: Do All Roads Lead to Rome? , 1997, Cognitive Psychology.

[49]  J. Piaget,et al.  The Child's Conception of the World , 1971 .

[50]  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.

[51]  Larissa K. Samuelson,et al.  Non-Bayesian Noun Generalization in 3- to 5-Year-Old Children: Probing the Role of Prior Knowledge in the Suspicious Coincidence Effect , 2015, Cogn. Sci..

[52]  Karrie E. Godwin,et al.  Development of category-based reasoning in 4- to 7-year-old children: the influence of label co-occurrence and kinship knowledge. , 2013, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[53]  Christine Storm.  The Semantic Structure of Animal Terms: A Developmental Study , 1980 .

[54]  Charles Kemp,et al.  The discovery of structural form , 2008, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[55]  M. Sherman,et al.  The Intelligence of Isolated Mountain Children1 , 1932 .

[56]  Michelle Moloney,et al.  Knowledge, expectations, and inductive reasoning within conceptual hierarchies , 2004, Cognition.