Susan A Gelman
Biographic Data
| ID | 3636148 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Susan A Gelman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Susan A |
| FAMILY NAME | Gelman |
| SIGNATURE | GELMAN S A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Michigan |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 189 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 45 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
What we owe to ourselves: Investigating people’s sense of obligations to the self
Core to our moral sense is that we have obligations toward others, such that we are expected to curb self-interests in light of obligations to other individuals and society at large. But do we also have obligations to ourselves ? Motivated by this underexplored question in moral psychology, we conducted six studies ( N = 1,860) to systematically investigate how people view obligations to the self. Study 1 found that most participants endorsed the…
Beliefs About the Persistence of History in Objects and Spaces in the United States and India
Scattered evidence in the literature suggests that people may believe that non-visible traces of past events (e.g., origins, emotions, and qualities of the owner) persist over time in objects and spaces, even after the original source has been removed. To date, however, there has been no unified treatment to determine the scope and cultural consistency of this expectation. This study had four primary goals: (a) to assess how broadly participants …
You” and “I” in a foreign land: The persuasive force of generic-you
Testing the role of convergence in language acquisition, with implications for creole genesis
The main objective of this paper is to test experimentally the role of convergence in language acquisition (second language acquisition specifically), with implications for creole genesis. Although there is ample evidence that similar features in languages in contact are enhanced both in second language acquisition and the creation of new languages, scholars are rarely explicit about the exact nature of that similarity and have not been in a posi…
Memory for generic and quantified sentences in Spanish-speaking children and adults
Generic language ( Owls eat at night ) expresses knowledge about categories and may represent a cognitively default mode of generalization. English-speaking children and adults more accurately recall generic than quantified sentences ( All owls eat at night ) and tend to recall quantified sentences as generic. However, generics in English are shorter than quantified sentences, and may be better recalled for this reason. The present study provided…
Can White children grow up to be Black? Children’s reasoning about the stability of emotion and race
Recent research questions whether children conceptualize race as stable. We examined participants' beliefs about the relative stability of race and emotion, a temporary feature. Participants were White adults and children ages 5-6 and 9-10 (Study 1) and racial minority children ages 5-6 (Study 2). Participants were presented with target children who were happy or angry and Black or White and were asked to indicate which of 2 adults (a race but no…
Teleological talk in parent–child conversations in Quechua
Southern Peruvian Quechua is an indigenous language spoken primarily in rural communities in the Peruvian Andes. The language includes a syntactic construction, ‘ -paq’, that expresses purpose or function, thus providing an opportunity to trace how parents and children with little formal education express teleological concepts. The authors recorded parent–child dyads ( N = 36; children aged 3–5 years) talking about items in a picture book, and co…
Navigating the Social World: What Infants, Children, and Other Species Can Teach Us
Navigating the social world requires sophisticated cognitive machinery that, although present quite early in crude forms undergoes significant change across the lifespan. This book reports on evidence that has accumulated on an unprecedented scale, showing us what capacities for social cognition are present at birth and early in life, and how these capacities develop through learning in the first years of life.
Perspectives on Language and Thought: Interrelations in Development
Acquisition of generic noun phrases in Chinese: Learning about lions without an ‘-s’
English-speaking children understand and produce generic expressions in the preschool years, but there are cross-linguistic differences in how generics are expressed. Three studies examined interpretation of generic noun phrases in three- to seven-year-old child ( N =192) and adult speakers ( N =163) of Mandarin Chinese. Contrary to suggestions by Bloom (1981), Chinese-speaking adults honor a clear distinction between generics (expressed as bare …
When Worlds Collide – Or Do They? Implications of Explanatory Coexistence for Conceptual Development and Change
the character George Costanza is distressed to learn that his fiancee wants to socialize with his friends from his bachelor days. George has a theory that he inhabits two distinct ‘worlds’: the world of his friends (‘independent George’) and the world of his fiancee (‘relationship George’). Each world operates smoothly on its own, but together they are dangerously incompatible. If the two worlds interact, the results will be disas-trous. In Georg…
Concepts and Folk Theories
Human cognition is characterized by enormous variability and structured by universal psychological constraints. The focus of this article is on the development of knowledge acquisition because it provides important insight into how the mind interprets new information and constructs new ways of understanding. We propose that mental content can be productively approached by examining the intuitive causal explanatory "theories" that people construct…
Determining that a label is kind-referring: Factors that influence children's and adults' novel word extensions
The present studies examined factors that influence children's and adults' interpretation of a novel word. Four factors are hypothesized to emphasize that a label refers to a richly structured category (also known as a ‘kind’): generic language, internal property attributions, familiar kind labels and absence of a target photograph. In Study 1, for college students ( N =125), internal property attributions resulted in more taxonomic and fewer sha…
Children’s Use of Categories to Guide Biological Inferences
This paper addresses the issue of when children realize that biological concepts reflect biological knowledge, rather than irrelevant superficial features. Three sets of studies are reviewed, examining children’s use of biological categories as the basis of inductive reasoning. The first reports early-emerging beliefs about biological categories. The second examines how children begin to distinguish between biological and nonbiological categories…
Commentary
Commentaries| January 15 2010 Commentary Subject Area: Psychiatry and Psychology , Women's and Children's Health Susan A. Gelman Susan A. Gelman University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich., USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Human Development (1992) 35 (5): 280–285. https://doi.org/10.1159/000277221 Article history Published Online: January 15 2010 Content Tools Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & t…
A developmental examination of the conceptual structure of animal, artifact, and human social categories across two cultural contexts
Preschoolers’ Search for Explanatory Information Within Adult–Child Conversation
This research examined children’s questions and the reactions to the answers they receive in conversations with adults. If children actively seek explanatory knowledge, they should react differently depending on whether they receive a causal explanation. Study 1 examined conversations following 6 preschoolers’ (ages 2–4 years) causal questions in naturalistic situations (using the Child Language Data Exchange System [CHILDES] database). Children …
Learning from Others: Children's Construction of Concepts
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…
Children’s Expectations Concerning Natural Kind Categories
Research examining the early emergence of beliefs about natural kinds is described, and implications for theories of category development are considered. The research challenges three assumptions implicit in many studies: that children cannot form mature concepts, that categories do not differ substantially from one another, and that classification tasks are the best measure of children’s category knowledge. Categories, it is argued, allow and ev…
Bewitchment, Biology, or Both: The Co‐Existence of Natural and Supernatural Explanatory Frameworks Across Development
Three studies examined the co‐existence of natural and supernatural explanations for illness and disease transmission, from a developmental perspective. The participants (5‐, 7‐, 11‐, and 15‐year‐olds and adults; N = 366) were drawn from 2 Sesotho‐speaking South African communities, where Western biomedical and traditional healing frameworks were both available. Results indicated that, although biological explanations for illness were endorsed at…
Children's use of adult testimony to guide food selection
The Influence of Language Form and Conventional Wording on Judgments of Illness
Children's recognition of time in the causes and cures of physical and emotional reactions to illnesses and injuries
The present set of studies examined children's and college students' recognition of the role of time in the manifestation of causes and cures for illnesses and injuries. In Study 1, participants ranging from 4-year-olds through college students were presented with biological, moral, psychological, and irrelevant causes for illness symptoms and were asked how much time elapsed between the cause and the symptom. They were also asked if medicine wou…
The Essential Child: Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought
Essentialism is the idea that certain categories, such as “dog,” “man,” or “intelligence,” have an underlying reality or true nature that gives objects their identity. This book argues that essentialism is an early cognitive bias. Young children's concepts reflect a deep commitment to essentialism, and this commitment leads children to look beyond the obvious in many converging ways: when learning words, generalizing knowledge to new category mem…
Folk Biology as a Window onto Cognitive Development
Review Articles| January 11 2002 Folk Biology as a Window onto Cognitive Development Subject Area: Psychiatry and Psychology , Women's and Children's Health Susan A. Gelman; Susan A. Gelman University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich., USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Lakshmi Raman Lakshmi Raman University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich., USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google …
Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity In Cognition And Culture
Preface Domain specificity: an introduction Lawrence Hirschfeld and Susan Gelman Part I. General/Theoretical Approaches: 1. The modularity of thought Dan Sperber 2. Domain specificity and cultural variation are not inconsistent: lessons from number and music Rochel Gelman and Kimberly Brenneman Part II. Are Domains Theories?: 3. The theory theory Alison Gopkin and Henry Wellman 4. Thinking by children and scientists: false analogies and neglected…
Concepts and Folk Theories
Human cognition is characterized by enormous variability and structured by universal psychological constraints. The focus of this article is on the development of knowledge acquisition because it provides important insight into how the mind interprets new information and constructs new ways of understanding. We propose that mental content can be productively approached by examining the intuitive causal explanatory "theories" that people construct…
The importance of knowing a dodo is a bird: Categories and inferences in 2-year-old children
This study examined 2-year-old children's ability to make category-based inferences. Subjects were asked a series of questions that they could answer based on category membership, appearances, or both. In one condition, all pictures were named; in a second condition, none were named. Children performed well on prototypical pictures regardless of whether they were named; on atypical pictures, they performed better when category labels were provide…
Young children use motive information to make trait inferences
The present study investigates children's capacity to understand traits in a psychologically meaningful way. Participants included 18 individuals in each of 4 age groups: kindergarten (ages 5-6), 2nd grade (ages 7-8), 5th grade (ages 10-11), and adult. They heard a series of 6 short stories in which a main character performs an action based on a particular motive (positive, negative, or incidental) that results in either a positive or a negative …
Children's use of adult testimony to guide food selection
Conceptual and linguistic biases in children's word learning
Four studies examined the influence of essentialist information and perceptual similarity on preschoolers' interpretations of labels. In Study 1, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds were less likely to interpret 2 labels for animals as referring to mutually exclusive categories: when the animals were said to share internal, rather than superficial, properties and when the animals were perceptually similar rather than dissimilar. In Study 2, neither internal …
Beliefs about the origins of human psychological traits
The development of children's reasoning about the origins of human psychological traits was investigated across 4 studies with a total of 316 participants ranging in age from kindergartners to 5th graders and adults. The primary methodology was a switched-at-birth task (L. A. Hirschfeld, 1995), which poses a hypothetical nature-nurture conflict. Two major issues were addressed: (a) the extent to which psychological traits are viewed as a product …
You” and “I” in a foreign land: The persuasive force of generic-you
Can White children grow up to be Black? Children’s reasoning about the stability of emotion and race
Recent research questions whether children conceptualize race as stable. We examined participants' beliefs about the relative stability of race and emotion, a temporary feature. Participants were White adults and children ages 5-6 and 9-10 (Study 1) and racial minority children ages 5-6 (Study 2). Participants were presented with target children who were happy or angry and Black or White and were asked to indicate which of 2 adults (a race but no…
Children's recognition of time in the causes and cures of physical and emotional reactions to illnesses and injuries
The present set of studies examined children's and college students' recognition of the role of time in the manifestation of causes and cures for illnesses and injuries. In Study 1, participants ranging from 4-year-olds through college students were presented with biological, moral, psychological, and irrelevant causes for illness symptoms and were asked how much time elapsed between the cause and the symptom. They were also asked if medicine wou…
Compound Nouns and Category Structure in Young Children
Implicit contrast in adjectives vs. nouns: Implications for word-learning in preschoolers
On some views of language, when one uses a term to describe or label an object, a contrast is always implied. However, there is an important difference between nouns and adjectives in their contrastive use: adjectives imply a contrast between members of a single noun category, whereas nouns do not imply a contrast between members of a single adjective category. For example, describing a car as new suggests a contrast with other cars. However, lab…
Categories and induction in young children
The importance of knowing a dodo is a bird: Categories and inferences in 2-year-old children
This study examined 2-year-old children's ability to make category-based inferences. Subjects were asked a series of questions that they could answer based on category membership, appearances, or both. In one condition, all pictures were named; in a second condition, none were named. Children performed well on prototypical pictures regardless of whether they were named; on atypical pictures, they performed better when category labels were provide…
Cognitive Development: Foundational Theories of Core Domains
A revolution in the science of emotion has emerged in recent decades, with the potential to create a paradigm shift in decision theories. The research reveals that emotions constitute potent, pervasive, predictable, sometimes harmful and sometimes ...Read More
Toward a topography of mind: An introduction to domain specificity
Over the past decades, a major challenge to a widely accepted view of the human mind has developed across several disciplines. According to a long predominant view, human beings are endowed with a general set of reasoning abilities that they bring to bear on any cognitive task, whatever its specific content. Thus, many have argued, a common set of processes apply to all thought, whether it involves solving mathematical problems, learning natural …
Essentialist beliefs in children: The acquisition of concepts and theories
In their first few years of life, children are making sense of the world at two levels at once: at the fine-grained level of everyday object categories (deciding which things are trees and which are dogs and which are cookies), and at a broader level that some have called commonsense “theories.” Both are remarkable achievements. First, consider categorization. If children's vocabulary is any indication, by the age of 6 they have carved up the wor…
Mapping the mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture
Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity In Cognition And Culture
Preface Domain specificity: an introduction Lawrence Hirschfeld and Susan Gelman Part I. General/Theoretical Approaches: 1. The modularity of thought Dan Sperber 2. Domain specificity and cultural variation are not inconsistent: lessons from number and music Rochel Gelman and Kimberly Brenneman Part II. Are Domains Theories?: 3. The theory theory Alison Gopkin and Henry Wellman 4. Thinking by children and scientists: false analogies and neglected…
Children's understanding of homonyms
Previous tasks have shown that preschool and early elementary school-children typically have trouble learning and identifying homonyms (Peters & Zaidel, 1980; Mazzocco, 1989). It is possible that a one-to-one mapping assumption or a lack of metalinguistic skills makes homonym learning and identification particularly difficult. In three experiments we examined a total of 60 three-year-olds' ability to pick out homonym pairs, and the extent to whic…
Overextensions in comprehension and production revisited: Preferential-looking in a study of dog, cat , and cow
This study investigated overextensions in comprehension and production using a new method (the preferential-looking paradigm) in which children ( N = 99, mean age (younger) = 1;9, mean age (older) = 2;3) were asked to find the referent that matched the label they were given. Both Real Referent (in which there was a match) and Anomalous (in which there was no match) trials were included, as well as nonverbal control trials. During the Real Referen…
Colour term knowledge in two-year-olds: Evidence for early competence
It is commonly believed that colour terms are acquired unusually slowly. However, several recent studies suggest that preschoolers have more colour term knowledge than previously believed. In two studies, we investigated the colour term knowledge of 49 two-year-olds and the influence of schooling on their colour term acquisition. Both studies revealed considerable knowledge in such young children. A longitudinal comparison of children with and wi…
Why is a pomegranate an apple ? The role of shape, taxonomic relatedness, and prior lexical knowledge in children's overextensions of apple and dog
Children's overextensions (e.g. referring to a pomegranate as apple ) raise intriguing questions regarding early word meanings. Specifically, how do object shape, taxonomic relatedness, and prior lexical knowledge influence children's overextensions? The present study sheds new light on this issue by presenting items that disentangle the three factors of shape, taxonomic category, and prior lexical knowledge, and by using a novel comprehension ta…
Peter W. Jusczyk, The discovery of spoken language . Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1997. Pp. 314
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Generic noun phrases in mother–child conversations
Generic noun phrases (e.g. Tigers are fierce) are of interest for their semantic properties: they capture ‘essential’ properties, are timeless, and are context-free. The present study examines use of generic noun phrases by preschool children and their mothers. Mother–child pairs were videotaped while looking through a book of animal pictures. Each page depicted either a single instance of a particular category (e.g. one crab) or multiple instanc…
Conceptual and linguistic biases in children's word learning
Four studies examined the influence of essentialist information and perceptual similarity on preschoolers' interpretations of labels. In Study 1, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds were less likely to interpret 2 labels for animals as referring to mutually exclusive categories: when the animals were said to share internal, rather than superficial, properties and when the animals were perceptually similar rather than dissimilar. In Study 2, neither internal …
Young children use motive information to make trait inferences
The present study investigates children's capacity to understand traits in a psychologically meaningful way. Participants included 18 individuals in each of 4 age groups: kindergarten (ages 5-6), 2nd grade (ages 7-8), 5th grade (ages 10-11), and adult. They heard a series of 6 short stories in which a main character performs an action based on a particular motive (positive, negative, or incidental) that results in either a positive or a negative …
Putting the “Noun Bias” in Context: A Comparison of English and Mandarin
Recently, researchers have been debating whether children exhibit a universal “noun bias” when learning a first language. The present study compares the proportions of nouns and verbs in the early vocabularies of 24 English- and 24 Mandarin-speaking toddlers (M age = 20 months) and their mothers. Three different methods were used to measure the proportion of noun types, relative to verb types: controlled observations in three contexts (book readi…
Carrot-Eaters and Creature-Believers: The Effects of Lexicalization on Children's Inferences About Social Categories
This article examines how language affects children's inferences about novel social categories. We hypothesized that lexicalization (using a noun label to refer to someone who possesses a certain property) would influence children's inferences about other people. Specifically, we hypothesized that when a property is lexicalized, it is thought to be more stable over time and over contexts. One hundred fifteen children (5- and 7-year-olds) learned …
Emergence is what
The commentaries provide a thoughtful range of responses that reflect the existing theoretical diversity concerning explanations of language development. Below we clarify and amplify a few points from our original review that appeared to have been unclear
Buzzsaws and blueprints: What children need (or don't need) to learn language
Review essay on: B. M AC W HINNEY (ed.), The emergence of language . Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1999. An old joke that has been circulating for the past decade or so goes as follows: a biologist, a physicist, and a cognitive scientist were sitting around discussing the great achievements of their fields. The biologist waxed eloquent about the insights of Darwin's theory of evolution; the physicist expounded on the implications of Einstein's theory of g…
Beliefs about the origins of human psychological traits
The development of children's reasoning about the origins of human psychological traits was investigated across 4 studies with a total of 316 participants ranging in age from kindergartners to 5th graders and adults. The primary methodology was a switched-at-birth task (L. A. Hirschfeld, 1995), which poses a hypothetical nature-nurture conflict. Two major issues were addressed: (a) the extent to which psychological traits are viewed as a product …
The role of animacy in children's understanding of ‘move’
Animals are distinctive in that they are the causal agents of their own actions (e.g. a dog moves itself), whereas artifacts generally are not (e.g. a marble doesn't move itself). We examined whether children make use of this conceptual link between animacy and agency when interpreting the verb 'move' in English. Specifically, we hypothesized that the semantic interpretation of 'move' would differ, depending on whether the subject noun refers to …
Folk Biology as a Window onto Cognitive Development
Review Articles| January 11 2002 Folk Biology as a Window onto Cognitive Development Subject Area: Psychiatry and Psychology , Women's and Children's Health Susan A. Gelman; Susan A. Gelman University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich., USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Lakshmi Raman Lakshmi Raman University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich., USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google …
The Essential Child: Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought
Essentialism is the idea that certain categories, such as “dog,” “man,” or “intelligence,” have an underlying reality or true nature that gives objects their identity. This book argues that essentialism is an early cognitive bias. Young children's concepts reflect a deep commitment to essentialism, and this commitment leads children to look beyond the obvious in many converging ways: when learning words, generalizing knowledge to new category mem…
Psychology (44 works) · Developmental psychology (32 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (31 works) · Linguistics (24 works) · Cognitive psychology (23 works) · Computer Science (16 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · Epistemology (14 works) · Social Psychology (14 works) · Cognition (13 works)