Participants
We aim to collect data from a sample of 20 children between the ages of
4 to 9 years for each experimental condition group. We plan on four
experimental conditions: 2 linguistic forms [generic vs. specific]
crossed with 2 kinds of content [biological vs. cultural]. Each
group will be balanced in terms of gender and age. The total sample size
for our child participants therefore will be 104, and we will recruit
104 adults as well. As this is a direct replication and extension, the
sample size is informed by results from Noyes and Keil (2020)11This
sample size is based on calculating the effect size of the main t-test
from Noyes and Keil (2020) comparing cultural and biological generic
conditions. The effect size was 0.94. Power was set at 80% and alpha
to 0.05.. All participants’ first language is Persian. Children will
be recruited from Hayat, an educational institution for children in
Tehran.
We also plan to include adult participants, enabling us to investigate
possible developmental changes in the generics-essentialism link. Adults
will be recruited from users of university student groups on Telegram.
This study is approved by the ethics review committee at the first
authors’ university, and all participants will be asked to provide
informed consent.