Ellen M. Markman

TL;DR: The present work addresses how expectations about natural kinds originate by examining how young children, with their usual reliance on perceptual appearances and only rudimentary scientific knowledge, might not induce new information within natural kind categories.

TL;DR: Ellen Markman challenges the fundamental assumptions of traditional theories of language acquisition and proposes that a set of constraints or principles of induction allows children to efficiently integrate knowledge and to induce information about new examples of familiar categories.

TL;DR: This paper showed that children limit the possible meanings of nouns to refer mainly to categorical relations, and that this constraint greatly simplifies the problem of language learning by limiting the hypotheses that children need to consider.

TL;DR: This paper investigated elementary school children's awareness of their own comprehension failure when presented with inconsistent information, and found that children were more likely to notice explicit than implicit contradictions, and even 12-year-olds judged as comprehensible a sizable proportion of essays with seemingly obvious inconsistencies.