ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors examine the extent to which preschool children use auditory information in drawing inductive inferences about animals. In a study by J. T. H. Wong, 4-year-old children’s use of auditory and visual information has been compared. A series of studies by S. A. Gelman have shown that children as young as 3 years of age were able to go beyond perceptual cues and use conceptual information, such as category labels, to make judgments. Preschool children tended to use motion information more often than category labels to make categorical judgments. Children were presented with 2 pairs of animal stimuli, one pair at a time. The children were first taught a new property about the target and were then asked to infer if the property was also true for the test animal. The authors do believe that information of shape, sound and labels interact to guide children’s categorical judgment.
