Children’s selective trust in native-accented speakers

TLDR

The study proposes that children orient toward native community members to guide early cultural learning. The authors used two experiments in which preschoolers watched 10‑second videos of native‑ and foreign‑accented English speakers who silently demonstrated different functions with novel objects, then assessed children’s endorsement of the demonstrated functions. Across both experiments, preschoolers selectively learned and endorsed the non‑linguistic information from native‑accented speakers rather than foreign‑accented ones, even when the speech contained no meaningful content.

Abstract

Across two experiments, preschool-aged children demonstrated selective learning of non-linguistic information from native-accented rather than foreign-accented speakers. In Experiment 1, children saw videos of a native- and a foreign-accented speaker of English who each spoke for 10 seconds, and then silently demonstrated different functions with novel objects. Children selectively endorsed the silent object function provided by the native-accented speaker. In Experiment 2, children again endorsed the native-accented over the foreign-accented speaker, even though both informants previously spoke only in nonsense speech. Thus, young children demonstrate selective trust in native-accented speakers even when neither informant’s speech relays meaningful semantic content, and the information that both informants provide is non-linguistic. We propose that children orient towards members of their native community to guide their early cultural learning.