This article is a response to E. Heit and B. K. Hayes’s (2005) comment on the target article “Induction

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learns that a cat has a particular biological property, one could expand this knowledge to other cats. We argue that young children perform induction on the basis of similarity of compared entities, whereas adults may induce on the basis of category information. If different processes underlie induction at different points in development, young children and adults would form different memory traces during induction, and would subsequently have different memory accuracy. Experiment 1 demonstrates that after performing an induction task, 5-year-olds exhibit more accurate memory than adults. Experiment 2 indicates that after 5-year-olds are trained to perform induction in an adultlike manner, their memory accuracy drops to the level of adults. These results, indicating that sometimes 5-year-olds exhibit better memory than adults, support the claim that, unlike adults, young children perform similarity-based rather than category-based induction. The ability to make inductive generalizations is crucial for learning: If one learns that a cat has a particular unobserved biological property, one could extend this knowledge to other cats, and possibly to other mammals. Furthermore, by some accounts, ‘‘inductive inference is the only process... by which new knowledge comes into the world’’ (Fisher, 1935/1951, p. 7). There is much evidence that even infants and young children can perform simple inductions (Baldwin, Markman, & Melartin, 1993;

This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution and sharing with colleagues. Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or licensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party websites are prohibited. In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or institutional repository. Authors requiring further information regarding Elsevier’s archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit:

Currently available empirical evidence is often insufficient to distinguish among developmental theories of word learning, categorization, and induction. This paper argues that theories of conceptual development should be evaluated not only on the basis of their ability to account for empirical findings, but also on the basis of their consistency with a broader body of knowledge, particularly with the known properties of developing selective attention. The paper presents a brief overview of the behavioral and neurophysiological findings on the development of selective attention. These findings are argued to be inconsistent with the approaches assuming that early in development learning is driven by conceptual knowledge and naïve theories, but provide support to the approaches arguing that early learning may be impervious to conceptual influences. KEYWORDS: cognitive development, categorization, induction, word learning, attention. Current theories of conceptual development can be broadly characterized as those arguing that early learning relies predominantly on the low-level domaingeneral mechanisms of perception, attention, and memory (Sloutsky & Fisher,

Prior research had documented that semantically-similar labels that co-occur in child-directed speech promote generalization in young children. The present study examined whether co-occurrence probability – in the absence of semantic similarity – can influence children’s inferences. Four- and five-year-old children were exposed to an auditory speech stream consisting of trisyllabic nonsense words (e.g. “golabu”) that were concatenated into a continuous speech stream. After listening to the stream, children were given a label extension task where the first two syllables of a nonsense word were assigned to a novel target object (e.g. “gola”); children were asked to choose which of the three test items should be referred to by the remaining syllable of this nonsense word (e.g., “bu”; Experimental condition) or by a syllable from a different nonsense word (e.g., “ti”; Control condition). Children’s generalization performance in this task was similar to results of previous research that used natural rather than artificial language stimuli. These results are consistent with the notion that that low-level, automatic processes can influence performance on high-level reasoning tasks.

categories as absolute but membership in artifact categories as graded. In this study, we examined domain differences in beliefs about category boundaries among young children (5-year-olds). The results indicated that young children, like adults, were less likely to endorse graded category membership for animal than for artifact categories. These domain differences could not be attributed to domain differences in typicality. Implications for conceptual development and for models of domain specificity in adult cognition are discussed. Research on adult concepts indicates that category structure varies by domain of knowledge. These domain differences are thought to reflect systematic ontological commitments (S. A. Gelman & Coley, 1991). Particularly, adults’ belief that many animal categories are natural kinds (i.e., real categories that are discovered in nature) indicates that even atypical members (e.g., birds that cannot fly) are full category members by virtue of being included in the kind defined by nature. Thus, adults view animal categories as having discrete, objectively defined boundaries, and view

This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution and sharing with colleagues. Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or licensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party websites are prohibited. In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or institutional repository. Authors requiring further information regarding Elsevier’s archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit: