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Compositional Reasoning in Early Childhood
Open accessAbstract
Compositional "language of thought" models have recently been proposed to account for a wide range of children's conceptual and linguistic learning. The present work aims to evaluate one of the most basic assumptions of these models: children should have an ability to represent and compose functions. We show that 3.5-4.5 year olds are able to predictively compose two novel functions at significantly above chance levels, even without any explicit training or feedback on the composition itself. We take this as evidence that children at this age possess some capacity for compositionality, consistent with models that make this ability explicit, and providing an empirical challenge to those that do not.
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Children are not born with an adult-like ability to compose functions; there seem to be important changes between infancy and pre-school that could be tied to learning.
“First, children are not born with an adult-like ability to compose functions; in fact, there seem to be important changes between infancy58 and pre-school59 that could be tied to learning.”
From Human-like systematic generalization through a meta-learning neural network (2023) · cites this paper as [59]
The Abstract reports that children aged 3.5–4.5 can compose novel functions, supporting the preschool part of the sentence. The Discussion allows that prior learning may have contributed, but the paper does not establish a change from infancy to preschool or show that children lack this ability at birth. (LLM, conf=0.84)
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Cited by
Sorted by citations
Human-like systematic generalization through a meta-learning neural network
Lake, B. M., & Baroni, M. (2023) · Nature · doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06668-3 · Cited by 230
Metadata
- Authors
- Piantadosi, S., & Aslin, R.
- Affiliations
- University of Rochester (US)
- Corresponding author
- Piantadosi, Steven
- Venue
- PLOS ONE
- Publisher
- Public Library of Science (PLoS)
- Published
- 2016-09-02
- Volume
- 11
- Issue
- 9
- Pages
- e0147734
- ISSN
- 1932-6203 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC5010236
- OpenAlex
- W2509030838
- Cited by
- 53
- References
- 2
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 3 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 37 · 2020: 3 · 2018: 2 · 2016: 1
- FWCI
- 1.69
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- PLoS ONE (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Funders
- National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (F32HD070544)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Child and Animal Learning Development
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Language Development and Disorders
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Categorization, perception, and language
- Keywords
- compositional reasoning, language of thought, function composition, early childhood cognition, toddlers, representational competence, compositional semantics, conceptual development
- MeSH terms
- Child Development, Psychology, Child, Child, Preschool, Female, Humans, Male, Models, Psychological, Neuropsychological Tests, Problem Solving
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