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Shifting ontological boundaries or – how much influence does language have on perception and ontological status?

Shifting ontological boundaries or – how much influence does language have on perception and... Yoshida & Smith investigate how Japanese‐ and English‐speaking children generalise novel names to novel, animacy‐ambiguous items as well as artefacts. They expect children to assimilate ambiguous cases towards the more individuated side of the language‐specific individuation boundary. Their first experiment indicates that explicit linguistic input can guide Japanese children's interpretation of ambiguous examples. Their second experiment shows differences between generalization behaviours of Japanese and American children prompted by neutral questions. The results fit their predictions except for the colour‐shape similarity. Children seem to ignore colour and react in the same way as in the ‘shape only’ condition (see also Experiment 1). Experiment 3 validates the procedure of Experiment 2 and shows that children generalise unambiguous artefacts by shape. All in all, linguistic background seems to influence how children of around three years perceive ambiguous items and how they conceptualize their ontological status. However, there is scope for criticism. Stimulus validation The authors elegantly and economically validate stimulus ambiguity for Japanese children (Experiment 1). They have not done this for English‐speaking children (e.g. using questions with ‘him/her’ versus ‘it’). A validation would have clarified if stimuli were seen as equally ambiguous by both groups and if both groups were http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Developmental Science Wiley

Shifting ontological boundaries or – how much influence does language have on perception and ontological status?

Meints, Kirsten
Developmental Science , Volume 6 (1) – Feb 1, 2003
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References (12)

Publisher
Wiley
Copyright
Copyright © 2003 Wiley Subscription Services, Inc., A Wiley Company
ISSN
1363-755X
eISSN
1467-7687
DOI
10.1111/1467-7687.00247_4
Publisher site
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Abstract

Yoshida & Smith investigate how Japanese‐ and English‐speaking children generalise novel names to novel, animacy‐ambiguous items as well as artefacts. They expect children to assimilate ambiguous cases towards the more individuated side of the language‐specific individuation boundary. Their first experiment indicates that explicit linguistic input can guide Japanese children's interpretation of ambiguous examples. Their second experiment shows differences between generalization behaviours of Japanese and American children prompted by neutral questions. The results fit their predictions except for the colour‐shape similarity. Children seem to ignore colour and react in the same way as in the ‘shape only’ condition (see also Experiment 1). Experiment 3 validates the procedure of Experiment 2 and shows that children generalise unambiguous artefacts by shape. All in all, linguistic background seems to influence how children of around three years perceive ambiguous items and how they conceptualize their ontological status. However, there is scope for criticism. Stimulus validation The authors elegantly and economically validate stimulus ambiguity for Japanese children (Experiment 1). They have not done this for English‐speaking children (e.g. using questions with ‘him/her’ versus ‘it’). A validation would have clarified if stimuli were seen as equally ambiguous by both groups and if both groups were

Journal

Developmental Science – Wiley

Published: Feb 1, 2003

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