RESUMO
How does early social experience affect children's inferences and exploration? Following prior work on children's reasoning in pedagogical contexts, this study examined U.S. children with less experience in formal schooling and Yucatec Mayan children whose early social input is predominantly observational. In Experiment 1, U.S. 2-year-olds (n = 77) showed more restricted exploration of a toy following a pedagogical demonstration than an interrupted, accidental, or no demonstration (baseline). In Experiment 2, Yucatec Mayan and U.S. 2-year-olds (n = 66) showed more restricted exploration following a pedagogical than an observational demonstration, while only Mayan children showed more restriction with age. These results suggest that although schooling is not a necessary precursor for sensitivity to pedagogy, early social experience may influence children's inferences and exploration in pedagogical contexts.
Assuntos
Comportamento Infantil/etnologia , Comparação Transcultural , Comportamento Exploratório , Comportamento Imitativo , Aprendizagem , Pré-Escolar , Feminino , Humanos , Indígenas Norte-Americanos/etnologia , Masculino , México/etnologia , Estados Unidos/etnologiaRESUMO
In several previous studies, 18-month-old infants who were directly addressed demonstrated more robust imitative behaviors than infants who simply observed another's actions, leading theorists to suggest that child-directed interactions carried unique informational value. However, these data came exclusively from cultural communities where direct teaching is commonplace, raising the possibility that the findings reflect regularities in infants' social experiences rather than responses to innate or a priori learning mechanisms. The current studies consider infants' imitative learning from child-directed teaching and observed interaction in two cultural communities, a Yucatec Mayan village where infants have been described as experiencing relatively limited direct instruction (Study 1) and a US city where infants are regularly directly engaged (Study 2). Eighteen-month-old infants from each community participated in a within-subjects study design where they were directly taught to use novel objects on one day and observed actors using different objects on another day. Mayan infants showed relative increases in imitative behaviors on their second visit to the lab as compared to their first visit, but there was no effect of condition. US infants showed no difference in imitative behavior in the child-directed vs. observed conditions; however, infants who were directly addressed on their first visit showed significantly higher overall imitation rates than infants who observed on their first visit. Together, these findings call into question the idea that child-directed teaching holds automatic or universal informational value.
Assuntos
Desenvolvimento Infantil/fisiologia , Desenvolvimento da Linguagem , Aprendizado Social/fisiologia , Ensino , Criança , Comparação Transcultural , Diversidade Cultural , Feminino , Humanos , Comportamento Imitativo/fisiologia , Indígenas Norte-Americanos , Lactente , Masculino , México , Comportamento Social , Estados UnidosRESUMO
Theories of language acquisition have highlighted the importance of adult speakers as active participants in children's language learning. However, in many communities children are reported to be directly engaged by their caregivers only rarely (Lieven, 1994). This observation raises the possibility that these children learn language from observing, rather than participating in, communicative exchanges. In this paper, we quantify naturally occurring language input in one community where directed interaction with children has been reported to be rare (Yucatec Mayan). We compare this input to the input heard by children growing up in large families in the United States, and we consider how directed and overheard input relate to Mayan children's later vocabulary. In Study 1, we demonstrate that 1-year-old Mayan children do indeed hear a smaller proportion of total input in directed speech than children from the US. In Study 2, we show that for Mayan (but not US) children, there are great increases in the proportion of directed input that children receive between 13 and 35 months. In Study 3, we explore the validity of using videotaped data in a Mayan village. In Study 4, we demonstrate that word types directed to Mayan children from adults at 24 months (but not word types overheard by children or word types directed from other children) predict later vocabulary. These findings suggest that adult talk directed to children is important for early word learning, even in communities where much of children's early language input comes from overheard speech.