Relative contributions of kind- and domain-level concepts to expectations concerning unfamiliar exemplars - Developmental change and domain differences

Two inferential routes allow children to produce expectations about new ins tances of ontological categories like "animal" and "artefact." One is to ge neralise information from a "look-up table" of familiar kind-concepts. The other one is to use independent expectations at the level of ontological do mains. Our experiment pits these two sources of information against each ot her, using a sentence-judgement task associating properties with images of familiar and unfamiliar artefacts and animals. "Strange" properties are com patible with the ontological concept, but not encountered in any familiar k ind. A look-up strategy would lead children to reject them and an independe nt expectation strategy to accept them. In both domains, we find a differen ce in reaction to strange properties associated with familiar vs. unfamilia r items, which shows that even young children do use independent domain-lev el information, We also found a U-shaped curve in propensity to use such ab stract information. In addition, animal categories are the object of much m ore definite domain-level expectations, which supports the notion that the animal domain is more causally integrated than the artefact domain. (C) 200 1 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.