Transmission of Gossip: Evidence from German-, English-, and Turkish-speaking children

• In Event: You’ll never guess what I heard: When and how do children gossip?

Abstract

Humans show a tendency to gossip and share evaluative information about the events they did not witness first-hand. Languages differ in the way they mark “gossip” or indirect observation. Languages with evidential marking, i.e. Turkish, provide a special case for investigating the role of language in transmission of gossip. When reporting past events, Turkish grammatically encodes whether the speaker witnessed the event first-hand or not, unlike English and German in which evidential marking is optional. In two studies, we investigated how 3-, 5- and 7-year- old children, speaking different languages, transmit gossip.

In Study 1 (face-to-face), we investigated whether children would pass on gossip about an informant. Five- and 7-year-old German-speaking peer dyads (N = 128) were presented with a collaborative problem-solving task (e.g., deciding together what a creature eats). Each child individually received conflicting information about the solution from a different informant (e.g., one proposed rocks; the other proposed sand). Each child additionally heard gossip about the informant’s reputation: one informant had a good reputation; the other had a bad reputation. In the experimental condition, the reputation was relevant to the task (honesty), whereas it was irrelevant in the control condition (tidiness). Only 7-year-old children transmitted gossip and engaged in metatalk (reasons about the information reliability) about the informants in the experimental condition (e.g., “they heard she sometimes lies) but not in the control condition.

In Study 2 (online), we investigated how English- and Turkish-speaking 3- and 5-year-old children (N = 143) report the events they did or did not witness in the form of metatalk. The child and the experimenter (E) were asked to decide in which of the two houses a toy was hiding (one house had the toy’s footprints). After the child and E chose the house with the footprints, E left the Zoom meeting. An informant appeared on the screen and told the child that the toy was in the other house without the footprints, in three within-subjects conditions. In the direct-observation condition, the child witnessed the informant moving the toy. In the indirect-witness condition, the informant looked inside of both houses and stated that she saw the target object in the house without footprints. In the indirect-observation condition, the informant simply said that the toy is in the other house without the footprints. When E returned, the child had to convince E about how they know the toy is in the other house without the footprints, using metatalk (e.g., “I saw it move”, “I heard it is in the other house”). Turkish-speaking children expressed what they did or did not witness in the form of metatalk more often than did English-speaking children. Moreover, although 5-year-olds were more similar in their use of metatalk in the two linguistic groups, 3-year-old Turkish speaking children produced metatalk more often than did English-speaking 3-year-olds.

Thus, the linguistic structure might influence transmission of gossip. Languages with obligatory evidential marking might allow children to accurately communicate what is witnessed first-hand and what is gossip at an earlier age.

Authors

• Bahar Koymen, University of Manchester
  Presenting Author

• F. Ece Ozkan, University of Toronto

• Kirstie Hartwell, University of Manchester

• Jan Engelmann, University of California - Berkeley