Models of social anxiety suggest that negative social experiences contribute to the development of social anxiety and this is supported by self-report research. However, there is relatively little experimental evidence for the effects of learning experiences on social cognitions.The current study examined the effect of observing a social performance situation with a negative outcome on children's (8-to 11-years-old) fear-related beliefs and cognitive processing. Two groups of children were each shown one of two animated films of a person trying to score in basketball while being observed by others; in one film the outcome was negative and in the other it was neutral. Children's fear-related beliefs about performing in front of others were measured before and after the film and children were asked to complete an emotional Stroop task. Results showed that social fear beliefs increased for children who saw the negative social performance film.In addition, these children showed an emotional Stroop bias for social anxiety-related words compared to children who saw the neutral film. The findings have implications for our understanding of social anxiety disorder and suggest that vicarious learning experiences in childhood may contribute to the development of social anxiety.

When communicating across closely related languages or varieties (e.g. in interdialectal communication or in regions such as Mainland Scandinavia), speakers have to learn how to decode words that show partial phonological differences from the equivalents in their L1. Although contact situations like these are rather common, interlingual decoding has scarcely been addressed in the CxG literature. As a contribution to this field of research, the paper discusses how (a particular stage in) emerging receptive multilingualism can be modelled from a CxG perspective. Specifically, it deals with the idea that repeated interlingual decoding generates partially schematic cross-linguistic constructions mirroring the speaker’s knowledge about sound correspondences, as suggested by Diasystematic Construction Grammar (Höder 2019).