Preschool Children Use Linguistic Form Class and Pragmatic Cues to Interpret Generics Susan A. Gelman and Lakshmi Raman Generic noun phrases (e.g., ‘‘Bats live in caves’’) are important for expressing knowledge about abstract kinds. Past work has found that parents frequently use generic noun phrases in their speech to young children. However, little is known regarding how children understand these expressions, nor which cues signal generic meaning. The present set of 5 studies examined the influence of linguistic form class (e.g., ‘‘What color are dogs?’’ [generic] versus ‘‘What color are the dogs?’’ [nongeneric]) and of pragmatic context (e.g., ‘‘What color are they?’’ in the presence of either a single exemplar [generic] or multiple exemplars [nongeneric]). Participants were 2-year-olds (N 5 42), 3-year-olds (N 5 40), 4-year-olds (N 5 40), and adults (N 5 51). The data indicate that by 2 years of age, children use linguistic form class, and by 3 years of age, children use pragmatic context. These findings demonstrate that young children have begun to understand the distinction between generic and nongeneric noun phrases from a very young age, and that identification of generics is signaled not by formal or pragmatic cues alone, but by a combination of information from both language form and pragmatic context. It is suggested that children make use of multiple linguistic and conceptual cues to acquire and interpret generics. In learning words, children must figure out how to refer not only to particular objects (e.g., that Fido is ‘‘a dog’’), but also to the more abstract kinds in which these objects belong (e.g., ‘‘dogs’’ in general). Kind-referring expressions are also known as gen- eric noun phrases (Carlson & Pelletier, 1995; Shipley, 1993). Examples of generic statements are ‘‘Dogs are four-legged’’ or ‘‘Apples are red,’’ as opposed to nongeneric expressions such as ‘‘My dog is friendly’’ or ‘‘These apples are bruised.’’ Generics are dis- tinctive in making reference to categories as abstract wholes rather than to particular individuals, in expressing properties that are relatively essential rather than accidental, and in making statements that are relatively free of context rather than tied to a particular time or place. Generics pose two types of induction problems for learners. (a) When encountering any phenomen- on (e.g., a child sees a picture in a book of two horses eating hay), how can the child know if this observation generalizes to others of the same kind? For example, do horses in general eat hay, or just the horses in this book? This is referred to as the problem of generic knowledge (see Prasada, 2000). In a related way, the child must determine to which broader kind the generalization applies. For exam- ple, is it more appropriate to infer that horses eat hay, that farm animals eat hay, or that animals eat hay? (b) A second, related inductive problem concerns language interpretation. When hearing an utterance, how can the child determine if the speaker has a generic interpretation in mind, or something else? For example, a caregiver may say to a child either ‘‘The horses are eating hay’’ or ‘‘Horses eat hay.’’ How is the child to figure out which utterance is kind referring? This is referred to as the problem of generic language. Both induction problems must be solved for children to have a full understanding of generics (for a discussion, see Gelman, in press). This article focuses on the problem of generic language. Inductive Problem of Generic Language The question of how children identify an utter- ance as generic is exacerbated by the complexity of mapping between formal and semantic cues. Simply put, there is no one-to-one mapping between form and meaning in the case of English generics. Command of the generic–nongeneric distinction in English requires, at the very least, morphosyntactic cues, pragmatic cues, and world knowledge. All of r 2003 by the Society for Research in Child Development, Inc. All rights reserved. 0009-3920/2003/7401-0021 Susan A. Gelman and Lakshmi Raman, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan. This research was supported by National Institute of Child Health and Human Development grant HD36043 to the first author. The authors are grateful to the teachers, staff, and children of the University of Michigan Children’s Center, University of Michigan Center for Working Families, Generations Together, Gretchen’s House, Kindercare, and New Modern Montessori Nursery School for participating in this research. Correspondence concerning this article should be addresed to Susan A. Gelman, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, 525 E. University Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1109. Electronic mail may be sent to gelman@umich.edu. Child Development, January/February 2003, Volume 74, Number 1, Pages 308–325