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

Previous research has already demonstrated that even very young children are sensitive to language cues and learn differently from native and foreign speaker models. A possible explanation for this phenomenon suggests that spoken language is a sign of someone's cultural background and in this sense demonstrates the person's culture specific knowledge. The aim of the present study was to investigate what children think about native and foreign speakers' behavior in a domain that is typically regulated by cultural norms (tool usage), specifically whether they expect group members to act alike or not. In a violation of expectation paradigm, two-year-old toddlers first watched a video on which a native and a foreign speaker person used different tools for achieving the same goal. In the test phase a new native speaker model appeared and selected one of the previously seen tools for the same goal as it was used before. Results indicated that toddlers were surprised if the native speaker model had chosen the tool that had previously been used by the foreign speaker. In Experiment 2, the familiarization phase was exactly the same as in Experiment 1, but during the test phase, the model spoke a foreign language. Results, in this case, showed no significant differences between looking times. These experiments suggest that two-year-olds expect native (but not foreign) speakers to use the same tool for the same goals. As tool usage is a fundamental element of cultural knowledge, we propose that this pattern of results suggest that children expect native speakers to possess shared cultural knowledge at least in the domain of artifacts.

[Small steps toward an empathic multicultural world through a new perspective of social categorization as a tool in adaptive learning].

The investigation of the role and the mechanisms of social categorization has been in the focus of psychological research for quite a long time. However, the developmental approach to categorization and the arrangement of empirical findings within this field into a unified framework have received little attention so far. Based on the currently available evidence the paper proposes a new theory of 'culturally shared knowledge'. With the help of this approach we would like to draw attention to the fundamental role of social categorization in adaptive learning. In addition to providing a theoretical explanation of the experimental results, the last chapter describes practical techniques that might prove useful in the development of an empathic multicultural environment in the future.

Learning how to use a tool: Mutually exclusive tool-function mappings are selectively acquired from linguistic in-group models.

The current study investigated whether 4-year-olds used language as a cue to social group membership to infer whether the tool-use behavior of a model needed to be encoded as indicative of the tool's function. We built on children's tendency to treat functions as mutually exclusive, that is, their propensity to refrain from using the same tool for more than one function. We hypothesized that children would form mutually exclusive tool-function mappings only if the source of the function information was a linguistic in-group person (native) as opposed to an out-group (foreign) person. In Experiment 1, participants (N = 39) were presented with four tool-function pairs by a model who had previously spoken either in their native language or in a foreign language. During the test phase, children encountered new purposes for which they could either use the demonstrated tools' color variant or use another equally suitable, as yet unseen, alternative tool. In line with our predictions, children preferred to use the alternative tool for the new function only in the native language condition (native: 63.3%; foreign: 42.7%). Experiment 2 replicated the initial finding using another foreign language and demonstrated that the lack of mutually exclusive tool choice in the foreign condition did not originate from children's failure to encode the demonstration. These findings suggest that children restrict learning artifact functions from linguistic in-group models. The mutual exclusivity principle in the domain of function learning is used more flexibly than previously proposed.

3-Year-Old Children Selectively Generalize Object Functions Following a Demonstration from a Linguistic In-group Member: Evidence from the Phenomenon of Scale Error.

The present study investigated 3-year-old children's learning processes about object functions. We built on children's tendency to commit scale errors with tools to explore whether they would selectively endorse object functions from a linguistic in-group over an out-group model. Participants (n = 37) were presented with different object sets, and a model speaking either in their native or a foreign language demonstrated how to use the presented tools. In the test phase, children received the object sets with two modifications: the original tool was replaced by one that was too big to achieve the goal but was otherwise identical, and another tool was added to the set that looked different but was appropriately scaled for goal attainment. Children in the Native language condition were significantly more likely to commit scale errors - that is, choose the over-sized tool - than children in the Foreign language condition (48 vs. 30%). We propose that these results provide insight into the characteristics of human-specific learning processes by showing that children are more likely to generalize object functions to a category of artifacts following a demonstration from an in-group member.