Who can communicate with whom? Language experience affects infants’ evaluation of others as monolingual or multilingual

20-month-olds selectively generalize newly learned word meanings based on cues to linguistic community membership

A growing body of work suggests that speaker-race influences how infants and toddlers interpret the meanings of words. In two experiments, we explored the role of speaker-race on whether newly learned word-object pairs are generalized to new speakers. Seventy-two 20-month-olds were taught two word-object pairs from a familiar race speaker, and two different word-object pairs from an unfamiliar race speaker (4 new pairs total). Using an intermodal preferential looking procedure, their interpretation of these new word-object pairs was tested using an unpictured novel speaker. We found that toddlers did not generalize word meanings taught by an unfamiliar race speaker to a new speaker (Experiment 1), unless given evidence that the unfamiliar race speaker was a member of the child's linguistic community through affiliative behaviour and linguistic competence (Experiment 2). In both experiments, generalization was observed for the word-object pairs taught by the familiar race speaker. These experiments indicate that children attend to speakers' non-linguistic properties, and this in turn can influence the perceived relevance of speakers' labels. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Fourteen- to Eighteen-Month-Old Infants Use Explicit Linguistic Information to Update an Agent's False Belief

The current research examined how infants exploit linguistic information to update an agent's false belief about an object's location. Fourteen- to eighteen-month-old infants first watched a series of events involving two agents, a ball, and two containers (a box and a cup). Agent1 repeatedly acted on the ball and then put it in the box in the presence of agent2. Then agent1 disappeared from the scene and agent2 switched the ball's location from the box to the cup. Upon agent1's return, agent2 told her, "The ball is in the cup!" Agent1 then reached for either the cup (cup event) or the box (box event). The infants looked reliably longer if shown the box event as opposed to the cup event. However, when agent2 simply said, "The ball and the cup!" - which does not explicitly mention the ball's new location - infants looked significantly longer if shown the cup event as opposed the box event. These findings thus provide new evidence for false-belief understanding in infancy and suggest that infants expect an agent's false belief to be updated only by explicit verbal information.

Do Infants in the First Year of Life Expect Equal Resource Allocations?

Recent research has provided converging evidence, using multiple tasks, of sensitivity to fairness in the second year of life. In contrast, findings in the first year have been mixed, leaving it unclear whether young infants possess an expectation of fairness. The present research examined the possibility that young infants might expect windfall resources to be divided equally between similar recipients, but might demonstrate this expectation only under very simple conditions. In three violation-of-expectation experiments, 9-month-olds (N = 120) expected an experimenter to divide two cookies equally between two animated puppets (1:1), and they detected a violation when she divided them unfairly instead (2:0). The same positive result was obtained whether the experimenter gave the cookies one by one to the puppets (Experiments 1–2) or first separated them onto placemats and then gave each puppet a placemat (Experiment 3). However, a negative result was obtained when four (as opposed to two) cookies were allocated: Infants looked about equally whether they saw a fair (2:2) or an unfair (3:1) distribution (Experiment 3). A final experiment revealed that 4-month-olds (N = 40) also expected an experimenter to distribute two cookies equally between two animated puppets (Experiment 4). Together, these and various control results support two broad conclusions. First, sensitivity to fairness emerges very early in life, consistent with claims that an abstract expectation of fairness is part of the basic structure of human moral cognition. Second, this expectation can at first be observed only under simple conditions, and speculations are offered as to why this might be the case.

Sensitivity to linguistic register in 20-month-olds: Understanding the register-listener relationship and its abstract rules

Linguistic register reflects changes in speech that depend on the situation, especially the status of listeners and listener-speaker relationships. Following the sociolinguistic rules of register is essential in establishing and maintaining social interactions. Recent research suggests that children over 3 years of age can understand appropriate register-listener relationships as well as the fact that people change register depending on their listeners. However, given previous findings that infants under 2 years of age have already formed both social and speech categories, it may be possible that even younger children can also understand appropriate register-listener relationships. The present study used Infant-Directed Speech (IDS) and formal Adult-Directed Speech (ADS) to examine whether 20-month-old toddlers can understand register-listener relationships. In Experiment 1, we used a violation-of-expectation method to examine whether 20-month-olds understand the individual associations between linguistic registers and listeners. Results showed that the toddlers looked significantly longer at a scene in which the adult was talked to in IDS than when the infant was talked to in IDS. In contrast, there was no difference when the adult and the infant were talked to in formal ADS. In Experiments 2 and 3, we used a habituation switch paradigm to examine whether 20-month-olds understand the abstract rule that a change of register depends on listeners rather than on speakers. Results showed that the toddlers looked significantly longer at the scene where the register rule was violated. The present findings provide new evidence that even 20-month-olds already understand that people change their way of speaking based on listeners, although their understanding of individual register-listener relationships is immature.

Children’s Third-Party Understanding of Communicative Interactions in a Foreign Language

Two studies explored young children’s understanding of the role of shared language in communication by investigating how monolingual English-speaking children interact with an English speaker, a Spanish speaker, and a bilingual experimenter who spoke both English and Spanish. When the bilingual experimenter spoke in Spanish or English to request objects, four-year-old children, but not three-year-olds, used her language choice to determine whom she addressed (e.g. requests in Spanish were directed to the Spanish speaker). Importantly, children used this cue – language choice – only in a communicative context. The findings suggest that by four years, monolingual children recognize that speaking the same language enables successful communication, even when that language is unfamiliar to them. Three-year-old children’s failure to make this distinction suggests that this capacity likely undergoes significant development in early childhood, although other capacities might also be at play.

Accent, Language, and Race: 4-6-Year-Old Children's Inferences Differ by Speaker Cue

Three experiments examined 4- to 6-year-olds' use of potential cues to geographic background. In Experiment 1 (N = 72), 4- to 5-year-olds used a speaker's foreign accent to infer that they currently live far away, but 6-year-olds did not. In Experiment 2 (N = 72), children at all ages used accent to infer where a speaker was born. In both experiments, race played some role in children's geographic inferences. Finally, in Experiment 3 (N = 48), 6-year-olds used language to infer both where a speaker was born and where they currently live. These findings reveal critical differences across development in the ways that speaker characteristics are used as inferential cues to a speaker's geographic location and history.

Preverbal Infants Infer Third-Party Social Relationships Based on Language

Language provides rich social information about its speakers. For instance, adults and children make inferences about a speaker's social identity, geographic origins, and group membership based on her language and accent. Although infants prefer speakers of familiar languages (Kinzler, Dupoux, & Spelke, 2007), little is known about the developmental origins of humans' sensitivity to language as marker of social identity. We investigated whether 9-month-olds use the language a person speaks as an indicator of that person's likely social relationships. Infants were familiarized with videos of two people who spoke the same or different languages, and then viewed test videos of those two individuals affiliating or disengaging. Results suggest that infants expected two people who spoke the same language to be more likely to affiliate than two people who spoke different languages. Thus, infants view language as a meaningful social marker and use language to make inferences about third-party social relationships.

She called that thing a mido, but should you call it a mido too? Linguistic experience influences infants' expectations of conventionality

Words are powerful communicative tools because of conventionality-their meanings are shared among same language users. Although evidence demonstrates that an understanding of conventionality is present early in life, this work has focused on infants being raised in English-speaking monolingual environments. As such, little is known about the role that experience in multilingual environments plays in the development of an understanding of conventionality. We addressed this gap with 13-month-old infants regularly exposed to more than one language. Infants were familiarized to two speakers who either spoke the same (English), or different (French vs. English) languages. Next, infants were habituated to a video in which one of the speakers provided a new word and selected one of two unfamiliar objects. Infants were then shown test events in which the other speaker provided the same label and selected either the same object or a different object. Our results demonstrate that exposure to at least one other language influences infants' expectations about conventionality. Unlike monolinguals, bilingual infants do not assume that word meanings are shared across speakers who use the same language. Interestingly, when shown speakers who use different languages, bilingual infants looked longer toward the test trials in which the second speaker labeled the object consistently with the first speaker. This finding suggests that exposure to multiple languages enhances infants' understanding that speakers who use different languages should not use the same word for the same object. This is the first known evidence that experience in multilingual environments influences infants' expectations surrounding the shared nature of word meanings. An increased sensitivity to the constraints of conventionality represents a fairly sophisticated understanding of language as a conventional system and may shape bilingual infants' language development in a number of important ways.