Young Children's Spontaneous Personification as Analogy

INAGAKI, KAYOKO, and HATANO, GIYoo. Young Children's Spontaneous Personification as Analogy. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1987, 58, 1013-1020. 80 kindergarten children were questioned regarding attributes of a rabbit, tulip, and person as well as about their reactions to novel situations. Most children gave correct answers for the observable attributes but overextended human characteristics for the unobservable ones. About two-thirds of the children sometimes gave explicit personification (i.e., described the target's reaction in person-relevant terms) or implicit personification (i.e., made essentially the same predictions and explanations for the target and person). These personifications tended to be associated with reasonable predictions. When another group of 47 kindergarten children were asked about a rabbit or tulip for other unfamiliar situations in which personification did not work, very few of them used it to generate unreasonable predictions. It is claimed that even children as young as 5-6 years of age can and often do apply personification as an analogy to animate objects to generate a reasonable prediction and that they try to constrain the personification by using their additional knowledge.