Poster #194 - How does an adult’s social status influence children’s learning of novel words?

• In Event: 2-110 - Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

Recent studies show that children are aware of status markers early in development. For example, around the age of 4, children begin to use cues like size, posture, and age to determine who holds power (Brey & Shutts, 2014; Charafeddine et al., 2014) and infer that wealthy individuals are nicer and smarter (Shutts et al., 2016). Preschool-age children also use similar cues to guide their learning: they prefer to learn from confident informants over uncertain informants and nice informants over mean informants (Birch et al., 2010; Doebel & Koenig, 2015). Taken together, these studies demonstrate that young children are attuned to the status of people around them and suggest that status information might influence children’s learning and attention.

In the present study, we tested whether young 4- to 5-year-old children (N=21, Mage=57 months, 14 males) use status information to guide their learning of novel object labels. Children viewed brief (15s) interactions between two individuals who differed in status. Status was marked by differences in clothing and body language (see Figure 1). Each individual then labelled two different novel objects (i.e., Speaker 1: tursey, coro; Speaker 2: blicket, pif). Children were then tested for learning of labels using the Looking-While-Listening procedure. On each of 8 test trials, children saw two objects, one of which had been labeled by each speaker. They then heard sentences labeling one object (e.g., Where’s the blicket?). All test labels were produced by the same speaker who produced the label during training. On half of trials, the high-status object was labelled (High-Status Trials) and on half of trials, the low-status object was labelled (Low-Status Trials). Children’s eye movements were monitored and coded for looks to the target and the distractor objects during three windows of interest: baseline (0-1800ms), pre-noun onset (1800-2400ms), and post-noun onset (2400-3900ms).

We first aimed to evaluate if children learned. To do so, we compared children’s accuracy in looking to the target during the post-noun window to chance (.5) and found that children reliably looked to the target after hearing the label (M=.58, p=.05), and there was no difference between trial types (p=.57). Next, we tested if children had a tendency to look at high-status objects (see Figure 2). During the baseline window, children’s looking did not differ from chance (M=.49, p=.72) or by trial type (p>.99). However, during the pre-noun onset window, children preferred to look at the high-status object (M=.60, p=.02), with no difference between trial types (p=.53). Moreover, during the post-noun onset window, children’s looking to the high-status object was marginally different between trial types (p=.07), underscoring that children successfully learned the correct labels on both trial types.

These results suggest that while children learned novel words from both high- and low-status individuals, they paid disproportionately more attention to objects labelled by high-status individuals. This study provides evidence that because of their sensitivity to even subtle cues that signify status, children may prioritize information and objects linked to higher-status individuals.

Authors

• Christine Potter, Princeton University
  Presenting Author

• Elizabeth L. Brey, University of Hawaii at Manoa
  Non-Presenting Author

• Casey Lew-Williams, Princeton University
  Non-Presenting Author