So It Is, So It Shall Be: Group Regularities License Children's Prescriptive Judgments
Cognitive science, Jan 3, 2016
When do descriptive regularities (what characteristics individuals have) become prescriptive norm... more When do descriptive regularities (what characteristics individuals have) become prescriptive norms (what characteristics individuals should have)? We examined children's (4-13 years) and adults' use of group regularities to make prescriptive judgments, employing novel groups (Hibbles and Glerks) that engaged in morally neutral behaviors (e.g., eating different kinds of berries). Participants were introduced to conforming or non-conforming individuals (e.g., a Hibble who ate berries more typical of a Glerk). Children negatively evaluated non-conformity, with negative evaluations declining with age (Study 1). These effects were replicable across competitive and cooperative intergroup contexts (Study 2) and stemmed from reasoning about group regularities rather than reasoning about individual regularities (Study 3). These data provide new insights into children's group concepts and have important implications for understanding the development of stereotyping and norm enforc...
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Abordamos diferentes teorías sobre la adquisición y desarrollo conceptual temprano, elaboramos una caracterización de conceptos genéricos (los conceptos que hacen referencia a categorías abstractas), abordamos la manera en que estos se expresan en quechua, y exponemos los resultados de una serie de investigaciones empíricas sobre la adquisición de conceptos genéricos en niños quechua hablantes. Los experimentos confirman que durante la infancia los niños quechua-hablantes diferencian los enunciados genéricos de los específicos así como de los cuantificadores. Lo que sorprende de estos resultados es la manera en la que estos coinciden con los resultados previos obtenidos con los hablantes de inglés y de mandarín. Podemos observar notables y fuertes coincidencias en la interpretación de los genéricos por parte de los hablantes de distintas lenguas y complejos culturales a través del mundo. Otro resultado sobresaliente es el hecho de que los hablantes de quechua atribuyen un valor genérico a los enunciados que lingüísticamente están no-marcados. Sugerimos que la capacidad universal de conceptualizar está en correlación con contextos culturales y lingüísticos particulares en la adquisición y desarrollo de conceptos. Las construcciones genéricas, aunque no tengan marcas morfológicas, constituyen un elemento esencial de articulación entre los procesos cognitivos universales y las especificidades de las lenguas y las culturas, la matriz del armazón y ontología específicamente quechuas.
Generic expressions—expressions that refer to a kind rather than to specific instances of the kind—play a critical role in the conceptual development of monolingual Southern Quechua children. We review different theories of concept development, characterize generic concepts, discuss how generics are expressed in Quechua, and describe the results of a set of studies examining generic concept acquisition in Quechua-speaking children. The two experiments reported here find that during childhood, Quechua speakers differentiate generics from specific utterances as well as from quantifiers. What is striking about all these results is how neatly they map onto prior findings with English and Mandarin speakers. We see remarkable and powerful commonalities in the interpretation of generics across speakers of structurally distinct languages spoken in culturally distinct communities of the word. A second major result from these experiments is that Quechua speakers assign generic interpretations to linguistically unmarked utterances. We end by suggesting that universal conceptual capacities interact with particular cultural and linguistic contexts to guide conceptual development. Generic expressions—though unmarked morphologically—are one important point of contact between general cognitive processes and the particularities of languages and cultures, the matrix of a specifically Quechua conceptual framework and ontology.
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