Essentialism in Brazilian children's extensions of animal names

The present study investigates whether Brazilian children have essentialist beliefs about animal categories. Two groups of Brazilian 4-year-olds (midd le class and from shantytowns) were told that 2 animals share either intern al or superficial properties. They were then taught labels for the animals. Across conditions, children from both groups were equally likely to interp ret the labels as referring to mutually exclusive categories of animals, bu t they differed on how likely they were to maintain an inclusion relation b etween the labels. More important, children from both groups were more like ly to accept a common label for animals sharing internal than superficial p roperties, indicating that internal property information convinced children that the animals were of the same kind. These findings were comparable to the results of a recent study by G. Diesendruck, S. A. Gelman, and K. Lebow itz (1998) with North American 4-year-olds.