Jean Piaget, founder of genetic epistemology and key researcher in child development psychology, showed that kids attribute “life status” to all things that move on their own, like bikes or clouds, and even 10-year-olds have difficulty understanding the nature of a 'living' thing.
Understanding the concept of a living thing is a late developmental achievement, he stated.
New research by Northwestern University psychologist Florencia Anggoro and colleagues Sandra Waxman and Doug Medin proposes that the way in which “alive” and other biological concepts are named within a given language also shapes their understanding and acquisition in children.
The researchers compared children ages 4 to 9 speaking English and Indonesian, a pair of languages with an intriguing difference - in English, but not Indonesian, the term 'animal' is polysemous, or has more than one meaning: one sense includes all animate objects (the animal kingdom) while the other excludes humans (‘don’t eat like an animal!’)