When Children Ask, “What Is It?” What Do They Want to Know About Artifacts?

Young children's rapid learning about artifacts

Tool use is central to interdisciplinary debates about the evolution and distinctiveness of human intelligence, yet little is actually known about how human conceptions of artifacts develop. Results across these two studies show that even 2-year-olds approach artifacts in ways distinct from captive tool-using monkeys. Contrary to adult intuition, children do not treat all objects with appropriate properties as equally good means to an end. Instead, they use social information to rapidly form enduring artifact categories. After only one exposure to an artifact's functional use, children will construe the tool as 'for' that particular purpose and, furthermore, avoid using it for another feasible purpose. This teleo-functional tendency to categorize tools by intentional use represents a precursor to the design stance - the adult-like tendency to understand objects in terms of intended function - and provides an early foundation for apparently distinctive human abilities in efficient long-term tool use and design.

Why things happen: teleological explanation in parent-child conversations

Research indicates that young children, unlike adults, have a generalized tendency to view not only artifacts but also living and nonliving natural phenomena as existing for a purpose. To further understand this tendency's origin, the authors explored parents' propensity to invoke teleological explanation during explanatory conversations with their children. Over 2 weeks, Mexican-descent mothers were interviewed about question-answer exchanges with their preschool children. Analyses revealed that children asked more about biological and social phenomena than about artifacts or nonliving natural phenomena, with most questions ambiguous as to whether they were requests for causal or teleological explanations. In responding to these ambiguous questions, parents generally invoked causal rather than teleological explanations. The tendency to favor causal explanation was confirmed by analyses of transcripts from a longitudinal study of spontaneous speech in a father-son dyad. These results suggest that children's bias toward teleological explanation does not straightforwardly derive from parent explanation.

How language acquisition builds on cognitive development

When children acquire a first language, they build on what they know--conceptual information that discriminates and helps create categories for the objects, relations and events they experience. This provides the starting point for language from the age of 12 months on. So children first set up conceptual representations, then add linguistic representations for talking about experience. Do they then discard earlier conceptual representations in favour of linguistic ones, or do they retain them? Recent research on the coping strategies that young children (and adults) rely on when they are unable to draw on language suggest that they retain both types of representations for use as needed.