Cultural and linguistic factors in concept acquisition: Evidence from Wichí folkbiology.

TAVERNA, A. S.; SANDRA WAXMAN

Washington

Congreso; Paper Symposium: The role of social and cultural factors in shaping children’s early learning. Society for Research on Child Development. Biennial Meeting Seattle, Washington, USA.; 2013

Society for Research on Child Development.

Abstract Recent research reveals that conceptual development is guided by an interplay between children’s early cognitive capacities and the shaping role of their experience, including the objects and events they are engaged with, the way these are described in their native language, and the way they are constued by members of their cultural community. In the current work, we focus on these factors in the Wichí community, an indigenous group of Amerindians living in the Chaco forest in north Argentina. We examine specifically two key folkbiological concepts – ANIMATE and LIVING THING— asking how these are shaped by linguistic and cultural experience. The Wichí are a strong native language-speaking community with a constellation of experiences and belief systems that differ in important ways from those more typically represented in prior work. Research with this relatively understudied community requires foundational evidence from adults. We adopted a three-pronged approach. In a first approach, focusing on the existing linguistic documentation, we reported the naming system that people use to describe folkbiological and spiritual concepts related to humans, non-human animals, and plants. We found a distinctive folkbiological lexicon which, from a Western perspective, links the biological and the spiritual world supporting many of their community-wide beliefs. We identified a key term - husek - that is instrumental in both biological and spiritual concepts and practices. In a second approach , we focused on the meaning people give to these terms. We examined Wichí people’s interpretation of husek and related notions, in the frame of both spiritual and biological relations. Seventeen native Wichí-speaking adults viewed 10 photographs, depicting living and non-living entities. Their goal was to identify which entity has husek. Most of our participants attributed husek only to ANIMATE. They denied it could be attributed to plants, natural kinds and artifacts, and discussed characteristics such as autonomous motion, goal-directed behavior to highlight the distinction between humans and non-human animals on the one hand, and plants on the other. Thus, Wichí people’s attribution of husek reveals their sensitivity to an underlying concept well aligned with our Western notion of ANIMATE. Finally, we addressed the developmental trajectory underlying the ANIMATE and LIVING THING concept in Wichí-speaking children and adults. We used a standard sorting task to examine 59 Wichí-speaking children (5-to-10-year-olds) and also the adults’ appreciation of a category that includes all and only LIVING THINGS. Results show an appreciation of both LIVING THING and ANIMATE concepts at all ages. Our findings also reveal a strong alignment of these folkbiological categories with the interpretation of the term husek in this culture. These results suggest that the universal appreciation of ANIMATE and LIVING THING express differently across cultures and across languages. Moreover, they are expressed not only in reasoning about biological world, but also about spiritual world as well. This work underscores the importance of considering the universals for the acquisition of folkbiological concepts but also how these universals interact with the specific cultural and linguistic practices in which children are raised. Key Words: concepts, development, folkbiology, language, Amerindian community, Wichí