ATTRIBUTE AVAILABILITY AND THE SHAPE BIAS IN CHILDRENS CATEGORY GENERALIZATION

The tendency of young children to focus on the component attribute of shape in making category decisions was assessed in three experiments. In Experiment 1a, preschoolers made category generalizations to novel objects primarily on the basis of single attributes of those objects. When they heard either labels or stories suggesting that the objects were members of particular animal categories, body shape was the most commonly used attribute. The fact that stories, which did not include labels, resulted in a shape bias indicates that the phenomenon is not a specifically linguistic constraint. This bias to base decisions on shape did not occur in Experiment lb in which the materials were designed to look unlike any animals that children had ever seen. In Experiment 2 the shape bias was reduced by varying other attributes (functional parts) that, like shape, could be considered to be basic-level category discriminators. The results suggest that children's shape bias is based on an interaction of conditions that highlight the existence of categories and children's knowledge about what types of attributes are useful for discriminating members of contrasting basic-level categories. © 1991.