The experimenter explained that the drawings were of objects such as an elephant and a mouse or a tree and a spider, but that because the other child had a broken arm, the drawings didn't always look much like what he or she had intended. Consistent with the earlier results, the researchers found that when the children were asked to describe the objects in the drawings, they used the size of the ovals and what they knew about the objects to decipher what the artist had intended to draw. For example, the children tended to describe a large oval as an elephant and a small oval as a mouse, rather than to do the opposite. In a third part of Bloom and Markson's study, children were shown pictures of three vertical ovals and one horizontal oval, representing items such as three pigs and one chicken. It's really striking that that's not the case.
Kids are really sensitive to what the person intended to do.
Bloom and Gelman showed children objects that resembled items such as a paper hat or a Plexiglas knife. They told the children either that an object had been created intentionally by someone or that it had been made by accident. In contrast, children who were told the items were made by accident tended not to use the familiar names when describing the objects. The fact that we find that understanding of intentions is guiding the way children name all kinds of objects suggests that it's very deeply ingrained in the language system. In their study, which compared children with and without autism, the researchers placed four toy cars or airplanes on a table between a child and an experimenter.