Discussion Questions: 13 March

1. If we habituated an infant to a yellow duck transforming into a white ball, would we expect him to be surprised when we show him both a yellow duck and a white ball?
2. Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how the Xu and Carey paper is supposed to support universal ontology at all. They show that children at 10 months look longer at an visual display we would find unexpected but what does this have to do with a theory of kinds?
3. What do the authors mean by the "match between the child's acquisition strategy and the mother's linguistic style"?
4. What features of mother's language (not studied here) might benefit more expressive children?
5. Xu and Carey use a modified habituation paradigm to suggest that 10 month olds do not differentiate objects into kinds, but 12 mos olds (who have more language experience do). Could their results be interpreted without the language context?
6. What exactly are Xu & Carey trying to conclude from their hypothesis that all infants seem to have an "object-first" concept? I.e., why would this be important?
7. Smith argues that the shape bias is a learned generalization from language input. What sort of input might the Japanese 2 year olds in the Imai and Gentner article have gotten to distinguish object vs. substance in word meaning?
8. We know from another paper that, compared to American children, Japanese children have less practice in identifying objects by nouns than with using objects in a social setting. Could this affect the outcome of the Imai & Gentner experiments in which children were asked to identify varieties of objects?