Inagaki K, Hatano G
Faculty of Education, Chiba University, Japan.
Child Dev. 1996 Dec;67(6):2823-40.
In 4 experiments, we examined whether young children have grasped commonalities between animals and plants as one of the essential components of an autonomous domain of biology. Experiment 1 revealed that by age 5, children distinguished both animals and plants from nonliving things in terms of growth (i.e., changes in size over time). Experiments 2 and 2A indicated that a considerable number of 5-year-olds, when given brief vitalistic descriptions about properties of all living things, constrained inductive projections of these properties using the category of living things. They attributed not only growth but also taking food/water and being taken ill to both animals and plants only. In Experiment 3, when 5-year-old children were asked directly whether plants or nonliving things would manifest phenomena similar to those observed for animals, they responded affirmatively for plants and could offer specific phenomena for growth, feeding, and aging/dying in support of their answers (e.g., watering for plants as analogous to feeding for animals). Overall, contrary to Carey, children as young as 5 years have an integrated category of living things. The possibility that early biology is established around taking food/water and growth is discussed.
在4个实验中，我们研究了幼儿是否已经掌握了动物和植物之间的共性，将其作为自主生物学领域的基本组成部分之一。实验1表明，到5岁时，儿童在生长方面（即随时间的大小变化）将动物和植物与非生物区分开来。实验2和2A表明，相当数量的5岁儿童在听到关于所有生物属性的简短活力论描述后，会使用生物类别来限制这些属性的归纳推理。他们不仅将生长，还将摄取食物/水和生病仅归因于动物和植物。在实验3中，当直接询问5岁儿童植物或非生物是否会表现出与动物观察到的现象相似的现象时，他们对植物给出了肯定的回答，并能提供生长、进食和衰老/死亡的具体现象来支持他们的答案（例如，给植物浇水类似于给动物喂食）。总体而言，与凯里的观点相反，年仅5岁的儿童就有一个整合的生物类别。本文讨论了早期生物学围绕摄取食物/水和生长建立的可能性。
