Decades of research have documented in school-aged children a persistent difficulty apprehending an overarching biological concept that encompasses animate entities such as humans and nonhuman animals, as well as plants. This has led many researchers to conclude that young children have yet to integrate plants and animate entities into a concept of LIVING THING. However, virtually all investigations have used the word “alive” to probe children's understanding, a term that technically describes all living things, but in practice is often aligned with animate entities only. We show that when alive is replaced with less ambiguous probes, children readily demonstrate knowledge of an overarching concept linking plants with humans and nonhuman animals. This work suggests that children have a burgeoning appreciation of this fundamental biological concept, and that the word alive paradoxically masks young children's appreciation of the concept to which it is meant to refer.

中文翻译：

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揭开“活着”的面纱：孩子们对连接所有生物的概念的欣赏

数十年的研究记录了学龄儿童在理解包括人类和非人类动物等有生命的实体以及植物在内的总体生物学概念方面的持续困难。这导致许多研究人员得出结论，幼儿尚未将植物和有生命的实体整合到有生命的概念中。然而，几乎所有的调查都使用“活着”这个词来探究儿童的理解，这个术语在技术上描述了所有生物，但在实践中通常只与有生命的实体保持一致。我们表明，当活体被不那么模糊的探针取代时，儿童很容易展示出将植物与人类和非人类动物联系起来的总体概念的知识。