Search for: All records

Generalizations are powerful tools to convey information agents need to predict and control their environments. However, some generalizations are restricted to “sociocultural bubbles”. How are such patterns communicated? We report one interdisciplinary study — bridging philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive developmental psychology — which examined the developing capacity for contextual restriction of generics in 4- 7-year-olds (N=137) and adults (N=63). We provided context cues signaling that the speaker used a generic generalization to convey a broad vs. contextually-restricted regularity, and measured endorsement of generics attributing properties prevalent globally vs. within “bubbles”. Adults endorsed generics flexibly, tracking context cues, but younger children struggled, over-attributing socially contingent properties to the group beyond the “bubble”, on par with context-general regularities. This reveals a troubling discrepancy between children and adults’ interpretations of generics, opening the door for cross-generational miscommunication. We discuss strategies to mitigate this in educational and family communication settings. 

We report a study examining developmental changes in perceptions of disagreements among speakers who use generics to describe contextually-restricted or unrestricted regularities. Participants (65 adults and 222 5-12-year-olds) reacted to generic claims from two speakers who attributed ostensibly contradictory properties to a biological kind (e.g. “Xs are striped” and “Xs are spotted”). Crucially, we manipulated the scope of each speaker’s claim, or its contextual restriction: whether they made a claim restricted to a specific context (island habitat), or an unrestricted claim. Participants were asked whether the speakers could “both be right” (faultless disagreement rating). Adults were sensitive to contextual restriction: they allowed for faultless disagreement when contextual restrictions mis-aligned (with additional differentiation among experimental conditions described below), and denied it when both speakers restricted to the same context. Young children demonstrated striking partial competence in faultless disagreement judgments much earlier than prior developmental literature suggested; however, their response pattern was not quite adult-like. This is the first study to document faultless disagreement between differentially restricted generics, both in adults and in children, and to start mapping developmental changes in this capacity. We discuss the developmental trajectory, and implications for social functioning and learning, and draw connections to semantic theories.