Credibility: Connections between linguistic and cognitive development
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Date
2010-06
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
This study explores whether children use a linguistic cue, accent, in deciding which people are credible information sources. Previous research has shown that children will preferentially select a fellow native language speaker as a friend over a non-native speaker, even if the native speaker is of a different race (Kinzler, Shutts, DeJesus, & Spelke, 2009). If a shared native language can improve how socially desirable a person is, it might also improve other social attributes, particularly that person’s credibility. Here, an ambiguous situation within an overimitation task is used to test credibility. Previous research has also suggested that the irrelevant actions of overimitation may have been interpreted as inexplicably necessary, and often persist through later demonstrations even if the child is explicitly instructed only to do necessary actions (Lyons, Young, & Keil, 2007). It is expected that children will be more likely to imitate unnecessary behaviors demonstrated by a native speaker than those shown by a foreign accented speaker, and that this bias might persist into the future.
A total of 96 monolingual English-speaking participants (5-year olds, 6-year olds, and adults) watched a series of videos about two girls, one who was a native English speaker and the other a Spanish-accented English speaker. After watching the girls demonstrate two differing methods to retrieve a prize from a novel toy, participants were asked to retrieve the prize from the toy themselves, and then demonstrate their method to a naïve viewer. As expected, 5- and 6- year olds tended to follow the native speaker significantly above chance, while adults showed a lack of preference for either speaker. In all groups, there was no significant difference in method between the first retrieval and the demonstration retrieval.
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Keywords
native preference, foreign accent, overimitation, cultural transmission