Poster #192 - Monolingual and bilingual toddlers monitor the accuracy of speakers

• In Event: 3-053 - Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

Previous research has shown that young child rely on social cues, such history of accuracy, familiarity, age, gender, and accent to modulate their learning and judgment of other people (Mill, 2013; Harris et al, 2018). One set of studies suggests that children trust informants to varying degrees depending on their history of interaction with those informants. A second set of findings shows that they assess unfamiliar informants for their cultural typicality, preferring those who conform to local norms. More recent work has extended children’s selective trust beyond word learning to other domains such as communicative cues, attractiveness, and social promise. However, how the learner’s characteristics influence selective trust remain less well known. In the present study, we examined whether bilingual and monolingual toddlers show similarities in monitoring the accuracy of an informant. One might predict that bilingual children will be more tolerant of an inaccurate speaker given their exposure to individuals with various degrees of proficiency in more than one language. Two groups of 18-month-olds were tested: one group (N= 68) included French-English bilinguals exposed at least 20% of the time to a second language. A second group was composed of monolingual French- or English-speaking children (N= 55) who were exposed to a second language less than 10% of the time. Each language group was randomly assigned to a reliable or an unreliable condition. In the reliable group, the speaker labeled 4 familiar objects accurately, whereas the unreliable speaker provided incorrect labels. Both groups were then tested on their willingness to learn novel words from the same speaker. For bilinguals, the word learning task was administered in their dominant language. Consistent with previous findings, the results indicated that both monolingual and bilingual infants were less willing to learn a novel word from an unreliable speaker (see Figure 1). These findings suggest that children who have exposure to more than one language show similar tendencies to trust informants who are culturally prototypical, that is, those who speak in ways that reflect the dominant language group.

Authors

• Olivia Kuzyk, Concordia University
  Presenting Author

• Cristina Crivello, Concordia University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Diane Poulin-Dubois, Concordia University
  Non-Presenting Author