First Principles Organize Attention to and Learning About Relevant Data: Number and the Animate-Inanimate Distinction as Examples

Early cognitive development benefits from nonilnguistic representations of skeietai sets of domain-specific principles and complementary domain-relevant doto obstroction processes. The principles outline the domain, identify relevant inputs, and structure coherently what is learned. Knowledge acquisition within the domoin is a faint function of such domain-specific principles and domain-general learning mechanisms. Two examples of early learning illustrate this. Skeietol preverboi counting principles help children sort different linguistic strings into those that function OS the conventional count-word OS opposed to labels for obfects in the child’s linguistic community. Skeletal causal principles, working with complementary perceptual processes that abstract information obout biological and nonbiological conditions and patterns of movement, leod to the rapid ocquisition of knowledge about the animate-inanimate dlstinction. By 3 years of age children con say whether photographs of unfamiliar nonmammoiion animals, mommois, statues, and wheeled obfectr portray objects capable or incopabie of self-generated motion. They also generate answers to questions about the insides of animate items more reodiiy than ones about the insides of inanimate items. Although these children already are ortlcuiote about motters relevant to a theory of action, their ilmited knowledge of growth iiiustrotes that early skeletal principies do not rule out the need to acquire new principles, in thls case ones that underlie a biological account of animacy (Carey, 1985).