Two-Year-Old Children Expect Native, but Not Foreign Speakers to Use the Same Tool for the Same Purpose

Area of Science:

• Developmental Psychology
• Cultural Psychology
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Young children differentiate learning from native and foreign speakers.
• Spoken language may signal cultural background and associated knowledge.
• Cultural norms, such as tool usage, guide social behavior.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate toddlers' expectations regarding native versus foreign speakers' adherence to cultural norms in tool usage.
• To determine if children expect group members to behave similarly within a cultural context.
• To explore the link between language, cultural knowledge, and social expectations in early development.

Main Methods:

• Violation of expectation paradigm with two-year-old toddlers.
• Familiarization phase: exposure to a native and foreign speaker using different tools for the same goal.
• Test phase: observing a new native speaker's tool selection and measuring toddler surprise (looking time).
• Experiment 2: repeating familiarization but with the model speaking a foreign language during the test phase.

Main Results:

• Toddlers exhibited surprise when a native speaker selected a tool previously used by a foreign speaker.
• No significant differences in looking times were observed when the model spoke a foreign language in the test phase.
• Two-year-olds expect native speakers to use tools consistently for the same goals, unlike foreign speakers.

Conclusions:

• Children as young as two years old expect native speakers to share common cultural knowledge, specifically in artifact use.
• This expectation of shared cultural knowledge appears linked to the native language of the speaker.
• Findings suggest early-developing expectations of cultural conformity among ingroup members, tied to linguistic identity.