Conceptually coherent categories support label-based inductive generalization in preschoolers

Why do words support inductive generalization in preschoolers? The current study provides evidence that they do so, at least in part, by working with conceptual knowledge to establish kind membership. A sample of 30 4-year-olds learned new labels for novel items, sometimes along with additional non-obvious information, and were then asked to generalize a novel object property to a target item based on either visual similarity or shared label. Children were more likely to generalize properties based on shared labels (over perceptual similarity) if they initially learned causally coherent properties of items referenced by those labels than if they initially learned non-causal properties of those items or learned no properties at all. This finding suggests that novel words best support inductive inference when they are known by children to reference conceptually coherent categories. Therefore, conceptual information permeates the process of inductive inference in young children. Results are discussed with respect to their implications for the "word-as-feature" and "knowledge-based" accounts of early inductive inference.