Concepts and Theories in Human Development

人类发展的概念和理论

• 批准号: 6772527
• 负责人: Susan A. Gelman
• 金额: $ 20万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN AT ANN ARBOR
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 1998
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1998-09-30 至 2007-04-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/6772527
• 关键词: behavioral /social science research tag; belief; child psychology; clinical research; concept; human subject; language; language development; middle childhood (6-11); nonEnglish language; perception; preschool child (1-5); psycholinguistics; semantics; speech

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): How do children organize their knowledge about the world? Recently there has been a shift in the treatment of concepts, from traditional views assuming that concepts can be characterized by superficial features, to "theory" views treating concepts as embedded in commonsense explanatory frameworks. The finding that children's concepts are tied to theories is especially striking, as it runs counter to a previously widely accepted view of children's concepts as "perceptually bound." In contrast, preschoolers expect category members to share nonobvious similarities, even in the face of salient perceptual dissimilarities, and judge non-visible internal parts to be especially crucial to the identity and functioning of an item. In a sense, very young children act as if members of a category share an underlying "essence". In the prior funding period, my collaborators and I addressed three goals: (1) We charted how essentialist beliefs are expressed in natural language by young children (ages 2-4 years), and how natural language expressions of essentialism are interpreted by young children. Specifically, this work focused on generic noun phrases as a vital means of essentialist expression. (2) We examined how concepts are influenced by two core essentialist components: unobservable causes and ontologies. (3) We sought to reconcile essentialism with the traditional view of children as focused on perceptual aspects of the world, by clarifying the conditions that lead to different profiles of performance. The competing renewal builds on the past work by examining the mechanisms by which generic language links to categorization and essentialist reasoning. Specifically, I address three focal issues:  the conceptual implications of generic language during childhood.  how generics are expressed and understood across structurally distinct languages and different cultural contexts.  the links between generic concepts and essentialist beliefs (including nativism, causal reasoning, and inductive reasoning). The proposed research uses naturalistic language analyses and experimental studies with children 3-10 years of age to address these questions. Specifically, the proposal has three aims: Part 1 charts how generic language influences children's category formation, memory, and reasoning. Part 2 examines the use and comprehension of generic language in two languages that are structurally very different from one another and from English (Quechua and Spanish). Part 3 examines how the distinction between generic kinds and other sorts of categories reflects and influences children's essentialist reasoning. Altogether, these 27 studies will provide converging and precise evidence regarding the links among concepts, language, and theory construction in early childhood.

描述（由申请人提供）：儿童如何组织他们对世界的知识？最近，从传统观点假设概念可以以肤浅的特征为特征到“理论”视为将概念视为嵌入在常识性解释框架中的“理论”观点。儿童概念与理论相关的发现特别令人惊讶，因为它与以前广泛接受的儿童概念的观点背道而驰。相比之下，学龄前儿童预计，即使面对显着的感知差异，类别成员也将共享非显而易见的相似性，并且判断不可见的内部零件对项目的身份和功能尤为重要。从某种意义上说，很小的孩子的行为好像一个类别的成员分享了基本的“本质”。在以前的资助期间，我和我的合作者谈到了三个目标：（1）我们绘制了本质主义信念是如何用幼儿（2-4岁）以自然语言表达的，以及幼儿的自然语言表达方式。具体而言，这项工作集中在通用名词短语上，这是本质主义表达的重要手段。 （2）我们研究了概念如何受到两个核心本质主义组成部分的影响：不可观察的原因和本体。 （3）我们试图通过澄清导致不同表现概况的条件来调和儿童的传统观点，将本质主义与儿童的传统观点相协调。竞争性更新是基于过去的工作来建立的，它通过研究通用语言与分类和本质主义推理联系的机制。具体来说，我解决了三个重点问题：童年时期通用语言的概念含义。如何在结构上不同的语言和不同的文化背景中表达和理解仿制药。通用概念与本质主义信念（包括本质主义，因果推理和归纳推理）之间的联系。拟议的研究使用自然主义的语言分析和3-10岁儿童的实验研究来解决这些问题。具体而言，该提案具有三个目的：第1部分图表了通用语言如何影响儿童类别形成，记忆和推理。第2部分研究了两种语言的通用语言的使用和理解，这些语言在结构上与彼此和英语（Quechua and Spanish）截然不同。第3部分研究了通用种类和其他类别之间的区别如何反映和影响儿童的本质主义推理。总的来说，这27项研究将提供有关幼儿期概念，语言和理论构建之间联系的融合和精确的证据。