What Do Children Want to Know about Animals and Artifacts? Domain-Specific Requests for Information
Children's questions may reveal a great deal about the characteristics of objects they consider to be conceptually important. Thirty-two preschool children were given opportunities to ask questions about unfamiliar artifacts and animals. The children asked ambiguous questions such as "What...
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Published in | Psychological science Vol. 17; no. 6; pp. 455 - 459 |
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Main Authors | , , , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
Los Angeles, CA
Blackwell Publishing
01.06.2006
SAGE Publications |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | Children's questions may reveal a great deal about the characteristics of objects they consider to be conceptually important. Thirty-two preschool children were given opportunities to ask questions about unfamiliar artifacts and animals. The children asked ambiguous questions such as "What is it?" about artifacts and animals alike. However, they were more likely to ask about the functions of artifacts, but about category membership, food choices, and typical locations of animals. They never asked questions about either artifacts or animals that would be considered inappropriate by adults. The results indicate that children hold different expectations about the types of information important for categorizing living and artifact kinds. Young children conceive of artifacts in terms of functions, but conceive of animals in terms of biologically appropriate characteristics. Such results speak to debates about the role of function in children's biological reasoning and to accounts of children's artifact concepts. |
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Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-2 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-1 content type line 23 ObjectType-Article-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 |
ISSN: | 0956-7976 1467-9280 |
DOI: | 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01727.x |