Relevance Communication And Cognition

Much of children's knowledge is derived not from their direct experiences with the environment but rather from the input of others. However, until recently, the focus in studies of concept development was primarily on children's knowledge, with relatively little attention paid to the nature of the input. The past 10 years have seen an important shift in focus. This article reviews this approach, by examining the nature of the input and the nature of the learner, to shed light on early conceptual learning. These findings argue against the simple notion that conceptual development is either supplied by the environment or innately specified, and instead demonstrate how the two work together. The implications for how children reconcile competing belief systems are also discussed.

Learning from Others: Children's Construction of Concepts

Young children interpret some acts performed by adults as normatively governed, that is, as capable of being performed either rightly or wrongly. In previous experiments, children have made this interpretation when adults introduced them to novel acts with normative language (e.g. ‘this is the way it goes’), along with pedagogical cues signaling culturally important information, and with social-pragmatic marking that this action is a token of a familiar type. In the current experiment, we exposed children to novel actions with no normative language, and we systematically varied pedagogical and social-pragmatic cues in an attempt to identify which of them, if either, would lead children to normative interpretations. We found that young 3-year-old children inferred normativity without any normative language and without any pedagogical cues. The only cue they used was adult socialpragmatic marking of the action as familiar, as if it were a token of a well-known type (as opposed to performing it, as if inventing it on the spot). These results suggest that – in the absence of explicit normative language – young children interpret adult actions as normatively governed based mainly on the intentionality (perhaps signaling conventionality) with which they are performed.

Young children attribute normativity to novel actions without pedagogy or normative language

Young children's selective learning of rule games from reliable and unreliable models

Reassessing the conceptual–procedural distinction

On the Role of Language in Children's Early Understanding of Others as Epistemic Beings.

Young children's early sensitivity to linguistic indications of speaker certainty in their selective word learning

Developing sensitivity to the sources of information: Early use of the Japanese quotative particles tte and to in mother–child conversation

【方法】対象者はＫ県の小学5年生235人のうち，4日間の食事記録がある185人。調査時期及び内容は，2013年10～11月のうち，4日間の食事記録を，写真法を併用した秤量法または目安量記録法で行った。食事記録と写真から，主食・主菜・副菜・主食と主菜等を合わせた料理・汁物等を確認し，それらを組み合わせた13の食事パタンに分類した。食事パタンの栄養素等摂取量の適正さは，日本人の食事摂取基準（2020年版）の1日の3分の1の値より評価した。 

Taeko Yamamoto

Papers

On the Role of Language in Children's Early Understanding of Others as Epistemic Beings.

Young children's early sensitivity to linguistic indications of speaker certainty in their selective word learning

Developing sensitivity to the sources of information: Early use of the Japanese quotative particles tte and to in mother–child conversation

Assessments of the Actual Situation and Adequacy of Nutrient Intake in Meal Patterns of Elementary School Students