Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2013 May;115(1):74-90. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2012.11.008. Epub 2013 Jan 29.
Category-based reasoning is central to mature cognition; however, the developmental course of this ability remains contested. One strong indicator of category-based reasoning is the propensity to make inferences based on semantically similar labels. Recent evidence indicates that in preschool-age children the effects of semantically similar labels are limited to a small subset of labels that co-occur in child-directed speech, suggesting that performance with these labels may reflect lexical priming rather than category-based reasoning. However, most co-occurring labels used in prior research refer to offspring-parent relationships (e.g., puppy-dog). Thus, it is possible that children in previous research performed induction by relying on kinship rather than co-occurrence information. To address this possibility, the current studies examined the role of kinship knowledge and label co-occurrence in induction in 4- to 7-year-old children and adults. The results point to a gradual age-related increase in the ability to spontaneously rely on kinship knowledge when making inferences.
基于类别(category-based)的推理是成熟认知的核心；然而，这种能力的发展过程仍存在争议。基于语义相似标签进行推理的倾向是类别推理能力的一个重要指标。最近的证据表明，在学龄前儿童中，语义相似标签的影响仅限于在儿童导向的言语中共同出现的一小部分标签，这表明这些标签的表现可能反映了词汇启动而不是基于类别的推理。然而，之前研究中使用的大多数共同出现的标签都指的是亲子关系(例如 puppy-dog)。因此，在之前的研究中，儿童可能通过依赖亲属关系而不是共同出现的信息来进行推理。为了解决这个问题，本研究在 4 至 7 岁儿童和成人中考察了亲属关系知识和标签共同出现在推理中的作用。结果表明，儿童在进行推理时，自发地依赖亲属关系知识的能力随着年龄的增长而逐渐增强。
