Poster #198 - Who Knows What to Call This Toy? Children’s Learning From Native and Foreign-Accented Speakers

• In Event: 3-159 - Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

Infants and children typically prefer to learn from people who share their native accent (Kinzler, Corriveau & Harris, 2011). There are many possible explanations for this robustly observed preference. One is that children simply prefer learning from language in-group members. Alternatively, children might expect a native-accented speaker to provide the most accurate and relevant information (Begus, Gliga & Southgate, 2016; Henderson, Sabbagh & Woodward, 2013). If the latter is true, children’s preferences should be flexible and depend on who the most informative speaker is likely to be in a given situation, regardless of accent. In support of this explanation, children prefer to learn from an accurate, foreign-accented speaker over an inaccurate native-accented speaker (Corriveau, Kinzler & Harris, 2013). Another situation in which it would be beneficial to learn from a foreign-accented speaker is when that person has more relevant cultural knowledge. The current study examines whether preschool-aged children reverse their typical preference for native-accented speakers when they are seeking information about foreign objects.
Young children regularly make geographic inferences about people on the basis of accent. For example, 4- and 5-year-olds infer that someone with a foreign accent lives far away (Weatherhead, Friedman & White, 2017) and associate unfamiliar cultural items with people with foreign accents (Wagner, Clopper & Pate, 2014). We ask whether children’s inferences about a link between accents and geography lead them to infer that foreign-accented speakers will have more relevant information about foreign objects. Four- and 5-year-old children (N = 48, Mage = 5.06 years) were introduced to a set of novel toys and were told that some of the toys were bought very far away, in Japan, and others were bought very close by, in Canada. Children were then asked to select one of two people, a foreign or a native-accented speaker, to label each object (4 trials total). Following labelling, children were asked to endorse one speaker’s label as the correct name of the toy.
Collapsing across both ages, children selected the native-accented speaker when the object was from close by and the foreign-accented speaker when the object was from far away at above chance levels (p = .023). Children also endorsed the foreign-accented speaker’s label for far away objects (and the native-accented speaker’s label for close by objects) more often than would be expected by chance (p = .025). Although there was no significant age-related difference in performance, 5-year-olds’ performance was significantly above chance for both selection and endorsement trials (p = .032, .017, respectively) while 4-year-olds’ was not (p = .307, .647, respectively).
Thus, children’s preference for informants who share their native accent disappears when they are learning about items associated with a foreign geographic location. This is consistent with demonstrations that children reverse their typical preference for adult over child informants when learning in particular domains (VanderBorght & Jaswal, 2009). More broadly, these findings suggest that children use accent, like other cues, including age and accuracy, to determine who will provide them with the most relevant information in a given situation.

Authors

• Alexandra Rett, University of California San Diego
  Presenting Author

• Katherine S. White, University of Waterloo
  Non-Presenting Author