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The role of accent and speaker certainty in children's selective trust
Abstract
Native English-speaking children prefer native English speakers over foreign-accented English speakers (Girard & Goslin, 2008; Kinzler et al., 2009; Kinzler et al., 2011). Young children also tend to distrust speakers who use uncertain language (e.g., “I guess,” “I’m not sure”) relative to those who use certain language (e.g., “I know, I’m sure”; Jaswal & Malone, 2007; Kim et al., 2012; Koenig & Harris, 2005). The present study asks how information about the speaker’s certainty interacts with the speaker’s accent. In particular, we asked whether speakers who are perceived as less reliable (foreign-accented individuals) are perceived as more reliable when they provide linguistic cues to certainty. We showed 89 typically developing monolingual native English-speaking 3- to 6- year-olds from North America pairs of videos in which two possible functions for a novel toy were introduced. We manipulated three variables: (1) whether the speaker introducing each function was a native- or foreign-accented English speaker; (2) whether the speaker expressed certainty or uncertainty about the function of the object; and (3) whether the experimenter who interacted with the child was a native- or foreign-accented English speaker. We found a strong preference to learn from native speakers, and found that this preference was impacted by the use of certain vs. uncertain language. These data are important for what they tell us about how children weigh different sources of information when deciding who to learn from. They are also of practical importance: if children are less likely to want to learn from foreign-accented speakers, then this has large implications for caregivers and educators.
... However, in a geographical inference task, both 4-and 5-year-olds distinguished their own accent from both regional and nonnative accents; 5-year-olds also showed some sensitivity to accent strength (Weatherhead et al., 2019). • Unfamiliar accents influence children's social preferences and attitudes (Kertesz et al., 2021;Kinzler et al., 2007;Nesdale & Rooney, 1996), in some cases more strongly than other indexical characteristics such as race (Cohen et al., 2021;Kinzler et al., 2009). An essential next step is determining what cues influence these judgements. ...
Abstract: The presence and strength of an accent are prominent indexical characteristics of speech for adults. Children are also sensitive to the presence of native and nonnative accents, but little is known about their perceptions of accent strength. Children utilize their knowledge of accents to make a variety of social judgments about relationships, including social preferences, trustworthiness, and societal status. Identifying the cues that children incorporate in their perceptions of accent is a crucial aspect of understanding how they form these judgments. To address this gap, this study utilized a ladder task, in which child and adult listeners ranked talkers based on their perceived distance from the local accent (i.e., Midland American English). Further, we evaluated the relation between objective pronunciation distance metrics (e.g., Levenshtein Distance, Dynamic Time Warping, and Speaking Rate) and the perceived distance rankings of children and adults to identify segmental or suprasegmental aspects of the speech signal that may influence rankings. Twenty 6-year-olds, twenty 12-year-olds, and twenty adults completed two ladders in which all talkers produced the same sentence and one ladder with a unique sentence for each talker. Stimuli were produced by female adult talkers representing four native, six nonnative, and one bilingual English accents. Two linear mixed effects models were built to identify whether age, sentence, or any of the objective pronunciation distance metrics were significant predictors of ladder rankings for children and adults. The first model incorporated age, sentence, and accent as predictor variables to identify how children and adults perceived accent strength. Whereas the specific accent variants significantly predicted ladder rankings, neither age nor sentence independently predicted rankings on the ladder task, suggesting that children were as sensitive to accent strength as adults. Results of this model revealed a significant interaction between sentence and accent, suggesting that an accent variant's ladder rankings are likely dependent upon sentential content. The second model incorporated the objective pronunciation distance metrics as predictor variables to examine their influence on ladder rankings. Levenshtein Distance was the strongest predictor of ladder rankings, but Dynamic Time Warping scores also independently predicted rankings across age groups and sentences, whereas speaking rate was not a significant predictor. Results from the second model suggest that for both children and adults segmental and suprasegmental cues influence perceptual judgments of accent strength. This study provides new data demonstrating that sensitivity to accent strength emerges in the early school-aged years with no additional age-related effect on rankings later in development, suggesting that sensitivity to accent strength is in place early and shows little change over time. [Supported by NSF grants 1941691 and 1941662]
This study reports on research stimulated by Lev-Ari and Keysar (2010) who showed that native listeners find statements delivered by foreign-accented speakers to be less true than those read by native speakers. Our objective was to replicate the study with non-native listeners to see whether this effect is also relevant in international communication contexts. The same set of statements from the original study was recorded by 6 native and 6 nonnative speakers of English. 121 non-native listeners rated the truthfulness of the statements on a 7-point scale. The results of our study tentatively do confirm a negative bias against non-native speakers as perceived by non-native listeners, showing that subconscious attitudes to language varieties are also relevant in communication among non-native speakers.
Nonnative accents are prevalent in our globalized world and constitute highly salient cues in social perception. Whereas previous literature has commonly assumed that they cue specific social group stereotypes, we propose that nonnative accents generally trigger spontaneous negatively biased associations (due to a general nonnative accent category and perceptual influences). Accordingly, Study 1 demonstrates negative biases with conceptual IATs, targeting the general concepts of accent versus native speech, on the dimensions affect, trust, and competence, but not on sociability. Study 2 attests to negative, largely enhanced biases on all dimensions with auditory IATs comprising matched native-nonnative speaker pairs for four accent types. Biases emerged irrespective of the accent types that differed in attractiveness, recognizability of origin, and origin-linked national associations. Study 3 replicates general IAT biases with an affect IAT and a conventional evaluative IAT. These findings corroborate our hypotheses and assist in understanding general negativity toward nonnative accents.
This article analyses the influence of accent on discrimination against immigrants by examining the hypothesis that accent leads to discrimination only in more prejudiced individuals, merely because people speaking with a native accent are perceived to be better qualified than those whose accent is non-standard. In Study 1 (N = 71), we found that only prejudiced individuals use accent to discriminate against immigrants. In Study 2 (N = 124), we replicated this effect and found that the influence of accent on discrimination is mediated by the perceived quality of the accent. Study 3 (N = 105) replicated the previous results even after controlling for the effect of stereotyping. These results are the first experimental illustration of the hypothesis that accent triggers intergroup discrimination only among prejudiced individuals because they evaluate native accents as being qualitatively better than accents of immigrants, thereby legitimizing ingroup bias.
Objectives:
Expert tool users are known to adjust their actions skillfully depending on aspects of tool type and task. We examined if bearded capuchin monkeys cracking nuts with stones of different mass adjusted the downward velocity and the height of the stone when striking palm nuts.
Materials and methods:
During a field experiment carried out in FBV (Piauí, Brazil), eight adult wild capuchin monkeys (five males) cracked Orbygnia nuts of varied resistance with hammer stones differing in mass. From recorded videos, we identified the highest strike per nut-cracking episode, and for this strike, we calculated the height to which the monkey lifted the stone, the maximum velocity of the stone during the downward phase, the work done on the stone, and the kinetic energy of the strike.
Results:
We found that individual capuchins achieved average maximum kinetic energy of 8.7-16.1 J when using stones between 0.9 and 1.9 kg, and maximum kinetic energy correlated positively with mass of the stone. Monkeys lifted all the stones to an individually consistent maximum height but added more work to the stone when using lighter stones. One male and one female monkey lifted stones higher when they cracked more resistant nuts. The high resistance of the Orbygnia nut elicits production of maximum kinetic energy, which the monkeys modulate to some degree by adding work to lighter stones.
Discussion:
Capuchin monkeys, like chimpanzees, modulate their actions in nut-cracking, indicating skilled action, although neither species regulates kinetic energy as precisely as skilled human stone knappers. Kinematic analyses promise to yield new insights into the ways and extent to which nonhuman tool users develop expertise. Am J Phys Anthropol, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
The present study tested how preschoolers weigh two important cues to a person's credibility, namely prior accuracy and confidence, when deciding what to learn and believe. Four-and 5-year-olds (N = 96) preferred to believe information provided by a confident rather than hesitant individual; however, when confidence conflicted with accuracy, preschoolers increasingly favored information from the previously accurate but hesitant individual as they aged. These findings reveal an important developmental progression in how children use others' confidence and prior accuracy to shape what they learn and provide a window into children's developing social cognition, scepticism, and critical thinking. Copyright: ß 2014 Brosseau-Liard et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
By age 3, children track a speaker's record of past accuracy and use it as a cue to current reliability. Two experiments (N = 95 children) explored whether preschoolers' judgements about, and trust in, the accuracy of a previously reliable informant extend to other members of the informant's group. In Experiment 1, both 3- and 4-year-olds consistently judged an animated character who was associated with a previously accurate speaker more likely to be correct than a character associated with a previously inaccurate speaker, despite possessing no information about these characters' individual records of reliability. They continued to show this preference one week later. Experiment 2 presented 4- and 5-year-olds with a related task using videos of human actors. Both showed preferences for members of previously accurate speakers' groups on a common measure of epistemic trust. This result suggests that by at least age 4, children's trust in speaker testimony spreads to members of a previously accurate speaker's group.
Adults and young children prefer to affiliate with some individuals rather than others. Studies have shown that monolingual children show in-group biases for individuals who speak their native language without a foreign accent (Kinzler et al., 2007). Some studies have suggested that bilingual children are less influenced than monolinguals by language variety when attributing personality traits to different speakers (Anisfeld and Lambert, 1964), which could indicate that bilinguals have fewer in-group biases and perhaps greater social flexibility. However, no previous studies have compared monolingual and bilingual children's reactions to speakers with unfamiliar foreign accents. In the present study, we investigated the social preferences of 5-year-old English and French monolinguals and English-French bilinguals. Contrary to our predictions, both monolingual and bilingual preschoolers preferred to be friends with native-accented speakers over speakers who spoke their dominant language with an unfamiliar foreign accent. This result suggests that both monolingual and bilingual children have strong preferences for in-group members who use a familiar language variety, and that bilingualism does not lead to generalized social flexibility.
This matched-guise study provides data on attitudes toward Mandarin Chinese-accented English by eliciting both Angloand Asian Americans'reactions to a male speaker. Study 1 discovered that in the context ofan employment interview, a speaker of Chinese-accented English was treated no differently than a standard American-accented English counterpart was and thatAsian American listeners were less evaluatively generous when it came to estimations of the speaker's attractiveness than their Anglo-American counterparts were. Study 2 explored the results further and found that the same Chinese-accented speaker was deemed less attractive than the standard American-accented speaker in the context of a college classroom. Tbgether, these studies demonstrate a need to understand better the role played by context in shaping attitudes toward varieties of language.
Research on preschoolers' selective learning has mostly been conducted in English-speaking countries. We compared the performance of Turkish preschoolers (who are exposed to a language with evidential markers), Chinese preschoolers (known to be advanced in executive skills), and English preschoolers on an extended selective trust task (N = 144). We also measured children's executive function skills and their ability to attribute false belief. Overall we found a Turkish (rather than a Chinese) advantage in selective trust and a relationship between selective trust and false belief (rather than executive function). This is the 1st evidence that exposure to a language that obliges speakers to state the sources of their knowledge may sensitize preschoolers to informant reliability. It is also the first demonstration of an association between false belief and selective trust. Together these findings suggest that effective selective learning may progress alongside children's developing capacity to assess the knowledge of others. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).
Under most circumstances, children (and adults) can safely assume that the testi-mony they hear is true. In two studies, we investigated whether 3-year-olds (N = 100) would continue to hold this assumption even if the person who provided the testi-mony behaved in an uncertain, ignorant, and/or distracted manner. In Study 1, chil-dren were less likely to trust that, for example, a key-like object was a spoon if the speaker indicated uncertainty about her testimony (e.g., "I think this is a spoon") than if she simply labeled the object ostensively (e.g., "This is a spoon"). In Study 2, 3-year-olds were also more skeptical about a speaker's testimony when she had ear-lier made an obvious naming error and seemed distracted, but not when she either made an error or seemed distracted. These results indicate that 3-year-olds can re-spond differently to the same testimony, depending on the speaker's behavior. Successful communication is built on trust. If you tell me that you had eggs for breakfast this morning, I trust that you actually believe that you had eggs. Your be-lief may be wrong because, for example, you misremembered or you ate an artifi-cial food that looked and tasted like eggs. Nevertheless, I expect that you believe what you say, and your saying it will likely cause me to believe it as well. As Grice (1975) pointed out, listeners expect that speakers will attempt to be truthful. In fact, a number of thinkers have suggested that children and adults may, by default, assume that testimony is true (e.g., Coady, 1992; Gilbert, 1991; Reid, 1764/1997; Spinoza, 1677/1982). Because most testimony is true, such a default assumption would be adaptive because it would mean listeners did not have to laboriously eval-uate the veracity of everything they heard.
A series of experiments investigated the effect of speakers' language, accent, and race on children's social preferences. When presented with photographs and voice recordings of novel children, 5-year-old children chose to be friends with native speakers of their native language rather than foreign-language or foreign-accented speakers. These preferences were not exclusively due to the intelligibility of the speech, as children found the accented speech to be comprehensible, and did not make social distinctions between foreign-accented and foreign-language speakers. Finally, children chose same-race children as friends when the target children were silent, but they chose other-race children with a native accent when accent was pitted against race. A control experiment provided evidence that children's privileging of accent over race was not due to the relative familiarity of each dimension. The results, discussed in an evolutionary framework, suggest that children preferentially evaluate others along dimensions that distinguished social groups in prehistoric human societies.
Do children and adults use the same cues to judge whether someone is a reliable source of information? In 4 experiments, we investigated whether children (ages 5 and 6) and adults used information regarding accuracy, confidence, and calibration (i.e., how well an informant's confidence predicts the likelihood of being correct) to judge informants' credibility. We found that both children and adults used information about confidence and accuracy to judge credibility; however, only adults used information about informants' calibration. Adults discredited informants who exhibited poor calibration, but children did not. Requiring adult participants to complete a secondary task while evaluating informants' credibility impaired their ability to make use of calibration information. Thus, children and adults may differ in how they infer credibility because of the cognitive demands of using calibration.
We investigated the influence of speaker certainty on 156 four-year-old children's sensitivity to generic and nongeneric statements. An inductive inference task was implemented, in which a speaker described a nonobvious property of a novel creature using either a generic or a nongeneric statement. The speaker appeared to be confident, neutral, or uncertain about the information being relayed. Preschoolers were subsequently asked if a second exemplar shared the same property as the first. Preschoolers consistently extended properties to additional exemplars only when properties were described in a generic form by a confident or neutral speaker. If a speaker appeared to be uncertain or if statements were made in a nongeneric form, properties were not consistently extended beyond the first exemplar. The findings demonstrate that children integrate the inductive cues provided by generic language with social cues when reasoning about abstract kinds.
One of the most distinctive characteristics of humans is the capacity to learn from what other people tell them. Often new information is provided about an entity that is not present, requiring incorporation of that information into one's mental representation of the absent object. Here we present evidence regarding the emergence of this vital ability. Nineteen- and 22-month-old infants first learned a name for a toy and later were told that the toy had undergone a change in state (it had become wet) while out of view. The 22-month-olds (but not the 19-month-olds) subsequently identified the toy solely on the basis of the property that they were told about but had never seen. Thus, before the end of their 2nd year, infants can use verbal information to update their representation of an absent object. This developmental advance inaugurates a uniquely human and immensely powerful form of learning about the world.
Courses
Public Speaking, Survey of Communication Studies, Interpersonal Communication, Intercultural Communication.
Objectives
This activity focuses on helping students (1) become aware of their implicit biases, (2) understand the relationship between implicit biases and the quality of arguments (i.e. unfounded ad hominem arguments), and (3) learn how to engage in meaningful classroom discussions.
Theories of stereotyping and prejudice have yet to be comprehensively applied to accents. U.S. adults (n = 124) listened to clips from Indian, Latinx, Arabic, and Toronto-accented speakers. They then completed stereotype measures based on solidarity, status, dynamism (SSD), and the Stereotype Content Model (SCM), and evaluated the speakers. Stereotypes, but not evaluations, differed between accents. Results suggest that measures of warmth and competence may be sufficient to capture differences in accent-based stereotyping. Authoritarianism predicted accent-based prejudice against non-North American accents relative to Toronto accents (as in-group allies), whereas social dominance orientation predicted more negative evaluations overall. Neither ideological belief predicted stereotypes.
Female characters are less likely to engage with science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) content than male characters on young children’s television shows. The current study examined how preschool-aged children’s selective trust of male and female characters to teach STEM differed by child gender, and how trust relates to children’s character identification. Forty-eight 3- to 6-year-old children’s selective trust of male and female characters to teach STEM content, gendered character identification, and personal interest in STEM activities was measured. Boys and girls had similar interest in STEM and had greater identification with same-gender characters. Although boys had significantly greater trust in male characters, girls had similar levels of trust in male and female characters. Overall, children had greater trust of male characters to teach STEM content, but this effect was driven by boys, indicating identification and selective trust are related, but not identical constructs. The discussion considers how representations of female and male characters on television may impact children’s trust of educational media characters to teach STEM.
Those who use non-indigenous accented speech often experience prejudice and discrimination, and in the United States, those speaking with Spanish accents are likely to be impacted. In research on speaker perceptions by type of accent, however, the gender of the speaker or of the perceiver has received less attention. In the present study, the impact of accent (North American- vs. Spanish-accented English), gender of speaker, and gender of rater on perceptions of competence were investigated in a sample of U.S. undergraduates. Participants heard a recording by either a male or female speaker who spoke in English with either a North American or Spanish accent. As hypothesized, Spanish-accented speakers were more likely to be judged negatively, female speakers were more likely to receive negative assessments, and male participants were more likely to show bias related to accent. The neglect of gender in the study of accent bias is discussed.
The present research examined preschoolers’ credulity toward misinformation from ingroup versus outgroup speakers. Experiment 1 showed that when searching for a hidden toy, Caucasian, English monolingual 4-year-olds were credulous toward the false testimony of a race-and-accent ingroup speaker, despite their firsthand observations of the hiding event, but were skeptical when the false testimony was provided by a race-and-accent outgroup speaker. Three-year-olds were credulous toward the false testimony of both speakers. Experiment 2 showed that when the false testimony was provided by a same-race-only or a same-accent-only speaker, 4-year-olds were not particularly credulous or skeptical. The findings are discussed in relation to how intergroup bias might contribute to the selective credulity in the 4-year-olds, as well as the factors that might explain the indiscriminate credulity in the 3-year-olds.
Children are able to distinguish between regular events that can occur in everyday reality and magical events that are ordinarily impossible. How do children respond to a person who brings about magical as compared with ordinary outcomes? In two studies, we tested children's acceptance of informants' claims when the informants had produced either magical or ordinary outcomes. In Study 1, children's skeptical or credulous stance toward magic predicted their endorsement of the claims made by the informants. Children who were more credulous were likely to accept information from the informant who had produced magical outcomes. In Study 2, a brief manipulation was only partially effective in changing children's initial stance toward magic. Their initial stance toward magic continued to predict their acceptance of information from the informant who had produced magical outcomes.
Prior work shows that children can make inductive inferences about objects based on their labels rather than their appearance (Gelman, 2003). A separate line of research shows that children's trust in a speaker's label is selective. Children accept labels from a reliable speaker over an unreliable speaker (e.g., Koenig & Harris, 2005). In the current paper, we tested whether 3- and 5-year-old children attend to speaker reliability when they make inductive inferences about a non-obvious property of a novel artifact based on its label. Children were more likely to use a reliable speaker's label than an unreliable speaker's label when making inductive inferences. Thus, children not only prefer to learn from reliable speakers, they are also more likely to use information from reliable speakers as the basis for future inferences. The findings are discussed in light of the debate between a similarity-driven and a label-driven approach to inductive inferences.
This study examines children's ability to detect accent-related information in connected speech. British English children aged 5 and 7 years old were asked to discriminate between their home accent from an Irish accent or a French accent in a sentence categorization task. Using a preliminary accent rating task with adult listeners, it was first verified that the level of accentedness was similar across the two unfamiliar accents. Results showed that whereas the younger children group behaved just above chance level in this task, the 7-year-old group could reliably distinguish between these variations of their own language, but were significantly better at detecting the foreign accent than the regional accent. These results extend and replicate a previous study (Girard, Floccia, & Goslin, 2008) in which it was found that 5-year-old French children could detect a foreign accent better than a regional accent. The factors underlying the relative lack of awareness for a regional accent as opposed to a foreign accent in childhood are discussed, especially the amount of exposure, the learnability of both types of accents, and a possible difference in the amount of vowels versus consonants variability, for which acoustic measures of vowel formants and plosives voice onset time are provided.
Unobservable properties that are specific to individuals, such as their proper names, can only be known by people who are familiar with those individuals. Do young children utilize this “familiarity principle” when learning language? Experiment 1 tested whether forty-eight 2- to 4-year-old children were able to determine the referent of a proper name such as “Jessie” based on the knowledge that the speaker was familiar with one individual but unfamiliar with the other. Even 2-year-olds successfully identified Jessie as the individual with whom the speaker was familiar. Experiment 2 examined whether children appreciate this principle at a general level, as do adults, or whether this knowledge may be specific to certain word-learning situations. To test this, forty-eight 3- to 5-year-old children were given the converse of the task in Experiment 1—they were asked to determine the individual with whom the speaker was familiar based on the speaker’s knowledge of an individual’s proper name. Only 5-year-olds reliably succeeded at this task, suggesting that a general understanding of the familiarity principle is a relatively late developmental accomplishment.
This study examines children's metaphonological awareness for accent-related information in connected speech. In the first experiment, 5- to 6-year-old French-speaking children were asked to discriminate between Southern and Northern accented French in a sentence categorization task. It was found that these children were not able to reliably distinguish between these native variations of their own language, but were able to distinguish between their own accent and a strong foreign accent in Experiment 2. These findings were also replicated using a speaker discrimination task in Experiment 3, where children were asked to detect pairs of speakers sharing the same accent amongst speaker pairs with different accents. Whilst these experiments have shown that 5- to 6-year-old children do not use non-familiar regional accents as a discriminatory cue, they are able to perceive the differences between accents, as demonstrated in the AX task used in Experiment 4. The factors underlying the relative lack of awareness for a regional accent as opposed to a foreign accent in childhood are discussed, especially regarding the amount of exposure and the learnability of both types of accents.
Non-native speech is harder to understand than native speech. We demonstrate that this “processing difficulty” causes non-native speakers to sound less credible. People judged trivia statements such as “Ants don't sleep” as less true when spoken by a non-native than a native speaker. When people were made aware of the source of their difficulty they were able to correct when the accent was mild but not when it was heavy. This effect was not due to stereotypes of prejudice against foreigners because it occurred even though speakers were merely reciting statements provided by a native speaker. Such reduction of credibility may have an insidious impact on millions of people, who routinely communicate in a language which is not their native tongue.
Across two experiments, preschool-aged children demonstrated selective learning of non-linguistic information from native-accented rather than foreign-accented speakers. In Experiment 1, children saw videos of a native- and a foreign-accented speaker of English who each spoke for 10 seconds, and then silently demonstrated different functions with novel objects. Children selectively endorsed the silent object function provided by the native-accented speaker. In Experiment 2, children again endorsed the native-accented over the foreign-accented speaker, even though both informants previously spoke only in nonsense speech. Thus, young children demonstrate selective trust in native-accented speakers even when neither informant's speech relays meaningful semantic content, and the information that both informants provide is non-linguistic. We propose that children orient towards members of their native community to guide their early cultural learning.
It has been repeatedly shown that when asked to identify a protagonist's false belief on the basis of his false statement, English-speaking 3-year-olds dismiss the statement and fail to attribute to him a false belief. In the present studies, we tested 3-year-old Japanese children in a similar task, using false statements accompanied by grammaticalized particles of speaker (un)certainty, as in everyday Japanese utterances. The Japanese children were directly compared with same-aged German children, whose native language does not have grammaticalized epistemic concepts. Japanese children profited from the explicit statement of the protagonist's false belief when it was marked with the attitude of certainty in a way that German children did not - presumably because Japanese but not German children must process such marking routinely in their daily discourse. These results are discussed in the broader context of linguistic and theory of mind development.
The extent to which young children monitor and use the truth of assertions to gauge the reliability of subsequent testimony was examined. Three- and 4-year-old children were presented with two informants, an accurate labeler and an inaccurate labeler. They were then invited to learn names for novel objects from these informants. The children correctly monitored and identified the informants on the basis of the truth of their prior labeling. Furthermore, children who explicitly identified the unreliable or reliable informant across two tasks went on to demonstrate selective trust in the novel information provided by the previously reliable informant. Children who did not consistently identify the unreliable or reliable informant proved indiscriminate.
Being able to evaluate the accuracy of an informant is essential to communication. Three experiments explored preschoolers' (N=119) understanding that, in cases of conflict, information from reliable informants is preferable to information from unreliable informants. In Experiment 1, children were presented with previously accurate and inaccurate informants who presented conflicting names for novel objects. 4-year-olds-but not 3-year-olds-predicted whether an informant would be accurate in the future, sought, and endorsed information from the accurate over the inaccurate informant. In Experiment 2, both age groups displayed trust in knowledgeable over ignorant speakers. In Experiment 3, children extended selective trust when learning both verbal and nonverbal information. These experiments demonstrate that preschoolers have a key strategy for assessing the reliability of information.
What leads humans to divide the social world into groups, preferring their own group and disfavoring others? Experiments with infants and young children suggest these tendencies are based on predispositions that emerge early in life and depend, in part, on natural language. Young infants prefer to look at a person who previously spoke their native language. Older infants preferentially accept toys from native-language speakers, and preschool children preferentially select native-language speakers as friends. Variations in accent are sufficient to evoke these social preferences, which are observed in infants before they produce or comprehend speech and are exhibited by children even when they comprehend the foreign-accented speech. Early-developing preferences for native-language speakers may serve as a foundation for later-developing preferences and conflicts among social groups.
• cognitive development
Three- and four-year-olds spontaneously use others’ past performance to guide their learning
- Birch