Labels: Category Markers or Objects Features? Or How Rocks and Stones are Different from Bunnies and Rabbits

The ability to generalize knowledge is crucial for humans, and it has long been known that labels play an important role in inductive generalization. However, the mechanism by which labels contribute to induction remains contested. According to one position, labels contribute to induction because even young children understand that labels denote category membership, and members of the same category have much in common. Support for this position comes from the finding that even very young children rely on semantically related labels (such bunny and rabbit or puppy and dog) when performing induction. However, experiments presented below demonstrate that unlike adults, children rely on semantically related labels during induction only when these labels are also strongly associated in the lexicon (and label pairs such as bunny-rabbit and puppy-dog happen to be not only semantically related but also strongly associated lexically); in the absence of strong lexical association, even well-known semantically-related words do not promote generalization.