Young children can in principle make generic inferences (e.g., ‘‘doffels
are magnetic”) on the basis of their own individual experience.
Recent evidence, however, shows that by 4 years of age children
make strong generic inferences on the basis of a single pedagogical
demonstration with an individual (e.g., an adult demonstrates for
the child that a single ‘‘doffel” is magnetic). In the current experiments,
we extended this to look at younger children, investigating
how the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon are integrated
with other aspects of inductive inference during early development.
We found that both 2- and 3-year-olds used pedagogical cues to
guide such generic inferences, but only so long as the ‘‘doffel” was
linguistically labeled. In a follow-up study, 3-year-olds, but not
2-year-olds, continued to make this generic inference even if the
word ‘‘doffel” was uttered incidentally and non-referentially in a
context preceding the pedagogical demonstration, thereby simply
marking the opportunity to learn about a culturally important
category. By 3 years of age, then, young children show a remarkable
ability to flexibly combine different sources of culturally relevant
information (e.g., linguistic labeling, pedagogy) to make the kinds
of generic inferences so central in human cultural learning.