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.