Concepts, Development of

Different Kinds of Concepts

Children acquire a wealth of different kinds of concepts, and these different concepts develop in different ways. For example, how students acquire a mathematical concept in a classroom may differ in important ways from how infants acquire a concept of animacy. Concepts vary from one another in content (mathematical, biological), process (learned explicitly in school vs. implicitly in ordinary interactions), structure (taxonomic relatedness vs. thematic relatedness), and function (allowing quick identification of prey while hunting vs. determining scientific classification). Furthermore, certain concepts are important for influencing other concepts and, thus, can be considered foundational. A concept such as cause, for example, implicitly guides children's learning; a concept such as alive has implications for how one thinks about animals, plants, and self-moving artifacts.

Concepts and Language

An enduring question is the relation of language to concepts. Research with infants, as well as with nonhuman species, demonstrates conclusively that organisms do not require language in order to learn and use complex and sophisticated concepts. Preverbal infants have rich expectations regarding number, causation, animals, containment, physical support, and so forth. At the same time, language appears to emphasize and support certain types of reasoning. Infants and young children treat words as “invitations” to form a category and search for commonalities. By 9 months of age, children more readily notice similarities among objects that receive the same name, compared to objects that receive different names or that receive no labels at all. Likewise, words encourage children to extend their knowledge in new ways. For example, if a preschool-aged child learns a new fact about one bird, she will infer that other birds have that same property, even other birds that look very different from the bird they first learned about. Moreover, the form of language influences the kind of expectations children reach, with nouns more than adjectives leading children to treat categories as stable and inference promoting. For example, children think that a person labeled with a noun (“He is a carrot eater”) is more likely to eat carrots his whole life than is a person described with a verbal predicate (“He eats carrots whenever he can”).

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