AI Article Synopsis

  • Generic knowledge refers to broad concepts about categories of things (like birds flying or a chair being for sitting).
  • The study investigates when and how children start using language to express this generic knowledge, suggesting they instinctively assume nouns represent general categories.
  • Findings from conversations show that children talk about kinds early, need little help from parents to learn these forms, and can recognize different ways to use language generically, although there are individual differences in how they form generalizations.

Article Abstract

Generic knowledge concerns kinds of things (e.g., birds fly; a chair is for sitting; gold is a metal). Past research demonstrated that children spontaneously develop generic knowledge by preschool age. The present study examines when and how children learn to use the multiple devices provided by their language to express generic knowledge. We hypothesize that children assume, in the absence of specifying information or context, that nouns refer to generic kinds, as a default. Thus, we predict that (a) Children should talk about kinds from an early age. (b) Children should learn generic forms with only minimal parental scaffolding. (c) Children should recognize a variety of different linguistic forms as generic. Results from longitudinal samples of adult-child conversations support all three hypotheses. We also report individual differences in the use of generics, suggesting that children differ in their tendency to form the abstract generalizations so expressed.

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Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3137552PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15475440701542625DOI Listing

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