Children and adults commonly produce more generic noun phrases (e.g., birds fly) about animals than artifacts. This may reflect differences in participants’ generic knowledge about specific animals/artifacts (e.g., dogs/chairs), or it may reflect a more general distinction. To test this, the current experiments asked adults and preschoolers to generate properties about novel animals and artifacts (Experiment 1: real animals/artifacts; Experiments 2 and 3: matched pairs of maximally similar, novel animals/artifacts). Data demonstrate that even without prior knowledge about these items, the (...) likelihood of producing a generic is significantly greater for animals than artifacts. These results leave open the question of whether this pattern is the product of experience and learned associations or instead a set of early-developing theories about animals and artifacts. (shrink)

Many languages distinguish generic utterances from non-generic utterances. Two studies examined how generic language specially links properties and categories. We used a novel-word extension task to ask if 4- to 5-year-old children and adults distinguish between generic and specific language, and judge that predicating a property of a depicted novel animal using generic language, rather than non-generic language implies a more kind-relevant connection between category and property. Participants were asked to endorse an extension of the label taught to a novel (...) animal matching the target instance on either overall similarity or the mentioned property. Wording was found to have a significant effect on responses for both age groups. Altogether, the results of these studies suggest that the generic may be a default interpretation for young children, who need to learn the semantics of specific and set-theoretic expressions. (shrink)