In order for children to understand and reason about the world in an adult-like fashion, they need to learn that conceptual categories are organized in a hierarchical fashion (e.g., a dog is also an animal). While children learn from their first-hand observation of the world, social knowledge transmission via language can also play an important…

Why is it that young children use connectives correctly in conversation, yet frequently err when asked to use the same connectives in formal reasoning? One possibility is that connective acquisition is item-based in which usage rules are induced from natural language input. This possibility was evaluated by examining the correspondence between the…