Generic language and judgements about category membership: Can generics highlight properties as central?

Abstract

Many languages distinguish generic utterances (e.g., ‘Tigers are ferocious’) from non-generic utterances (e.g., ‘Those tigers are ferocious’). 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 (e.g., ‘Bants have stripes’), rather than non-generic language (e.g., ‘This bant has stripes’) 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.

Keywords:

• Children
• Generics
• Semantics

Acknowledgements

These studies constituted a portion of the PhD dissertation completed by Hollander. The research was supported by NICHD grant HD-36043 to Gelman. Portions of this research were reported at the Biennial meetings of the Society for Research in Child Development. We are grateful to the children, parents, and teachers of the University of Michigan Children's Center and the University of Michigan Center for Working Families, for participating in the research. We are grateful for the insightful comments of Larry Hirschfeld, Bruce Mannheim, and Twila Tardif, on an earlier draft. We also thank Felicia Kleinberg, Erin Boyle, Allison Wachtel, and Jenna Salm for their able research assistance.