Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of classic tensions concerning the fundamental
nature of human knowledge and the processes underlying its acquisition. This tension …

Categorization is a process that spans all of development, beginning in earliest infancy yet
changing as children's knowledge and cognitive skills develop. In this review article, we …

Children's lives are governed by social norms. Since Piaget, however, it has been assumed
that they understand very little about how norms work. Recent studies in which children …

We hypothesized that generic noun phrases (“Bears climb trees”) would provide important
input to children's developing concepts. In three experiments, four-year-olds and adults …

Nominal concepts represent things as tokens of types. Recent research suggests that we
represent principled connections between the type of thing something is (eg, DOG) and …

These studies investigate how the distinction between generic sentences (eg,“Boys are
good at math”) and nongeneric sentences (eg,“Johnny is good at math”) shapes children's …

Generic sentences (eg,“Snakes have holes in their teeth”) convey that a property (eg, having
holes in one's teeth) is true of a category (eg, snakes). We test the hypothesis that, in …

In constructing a conceptual understanding of the world, children must actively evaluate
what information is idiosyncratic or superficial, and what represents essential, defining …

Generics are statements such as “tigers are striped” and “ducks lay eggs”. They express
general, though not universal or exceptionless, claims about kinds (Carlson & Pelletier …

How do infants begin to map words to their meaning? How do they discover that different
types of words (eg, noun, adjective) refer to different aspects of the same objects (eg, object …