Naming solids and nonsolids: Children's default construals

Four experiments used a free-naming task to examine children's and adults' default construals of solids and nonsolids. In Experiment 1,4-year-old children viewed entities presented in familiar geometric shapes (e.g., square, triangle), without touching them. One half saw solids (e.g., a square made of wood); the other half saw nonsolids matched carefully in shape (e.g., a square with the same dimensions but made of peanut butter). To tap their default construals, children were simply asked, ''What is that?'' Answers varied sharply with the type of stimulus. If the entity was solid, children tended to provide an individual-related word (e.g., ''a square''), even if they also knew a substance-related word (e.g., ''wood''). But if the stimulus was nonsolid, children tended to give a substance-related word (e.g., ''peanut butter''), even if they also knew an individual-related word (e.g., ''a square''). These words were usually common nouns produced in appropriate sentential contexts, suggesting that 4-year-olds represented the words as naming kinds. The same pattern of results obtained in Experiments 2 and 3, which were modified replications of Experiment 1. The results of Experiment 4 replicated the main findings of Experiment 1 using adults as participants. The studies suggest that, as a default, 4-year-olds conceptualize solids and nonsolids in (a) fundamentally distinct, (b) kind-based (rather than perceptual property-based), and (c) adult-like ways.