Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A wealth of developmental evidence suggests that children es-sentialise natural kind but not artifact categories, and that bothadults and children use generic language less with artifacts aswell (Gelman, 2003). Here we further explore the latter resultusing a novel model for generic identification. We apply ourmodel to a much larger dataset than before, consisting of 26CHILDES corpora of naturalistic speech involving children ata variety of ages and in a variety of contexts. We found noconsistent preference for generic usage in animates over arti-facts. Follow-up analyses indicate that this result was probablydriven by our inclusion of a wider variety of nouns into ourdataset than previous work.