Young children's early sensitivity to linguistic indications of speaker certainty in their selective word learning

Matsui, Tomoko; Yamamoto, Taeko; Miura, Yui; McCagg, Peter

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2015.10.007

Cited by 50 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Our results inform recent theoretical claims that human social and cultural learning might itself be a consequence of sociocultural processes (Heyes, 2012;Heyes & Frith, 2014) and ask for further research to explore the developmental origins of selective learning. , Notably, our findings seem at first glance not to fit with those of Matsui et al (2016) who documented 3-and 4-year-old Japanese children's good performance in selective learning. On a closer inspection, the two studies differ in at least two ways.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 99%

“…Some argued that semantic knowledge promotes fast learning in young children especially when it is delivered with a speaker's pedagogical cues (e.g., direct eye gaze; Csibra & Gergly, 2009). Japanese children's advantage in processing linguistic markers of speaker certainty along with the benefit of semantic knowledge for fast learning may explain Japanese children's selective learning in Matsui et al (2016). Nevertheless, incompatible findings between the two studies should be addressed by future studies systematically investigating selective learning and teaching of semantic and episodic knowledge in young children.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Therefore, we have good reasons to hypothesize that selective learning and teaching vary with culture early on in human development. Indeed, a few recent studies reported cultural variation in young children’s selective learning (Chan & Tardif, 2013; Lucas, Lewis, Pala, Wong, & Berridge, 2013; see also Matsui, Yamamoto, Miura, and McCagg (2016) for Japanese children’s selective learning abilities): a higher level of selective learning in Turkish preschoolers than in Chinese or British children (Lucas et al, 2013) and a stronger tendency to accept a conflicting report by a teacher in kindergartners from the United States with strong prior knowledge as compared with counterparts from Hong Kong (Chan & Tardif, 2013). Except for these studies, to our knowledge, there is relatively a lack of empirical studies that systematically investigated selective learning—let alone selective teaching—of children developing in different cultural backgrounds.…”

Section: Cultural Variations In Selective Learning and Teachingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Selective learning and teaching among Japanese and German children.

Kim¹,

Paulus²,

Sodian³

et al. 2018

Developmental Psychology

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Despite an increasing number of studies demonstrating that young children selectively learn from others, and a few studies of children's selective teaching, the evidence almost exclusively comes from Western cultures, and cross-cultural comparison in this line of work is very rare. In the present research, we investigated Japanese and German children's selective learning and teaching abilities. We found clear cultural differences. Japanese children were better at selectively teaching an ignorant person over a knowledgeable person than at selectively learning from knowledgeable others. By contrast, German children were better at choosing to learn from a knowledgeable rather than from an ignorant person than at selectively teaching ignorant others.The present findings suggest that the development of human learning and teaching, especially the tendency to take into account others' knowledge status, is strongly affected by cultural background.

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Cultural Variations In Selective Learning and Teachingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Selective learning and teaching among Japanese and German children.

Kim¹,

Paulus²,

Sodian³

et al. 2018

Developmental Psychology

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“…However, confidence is an imperfect knowledge cue: Indeed, an informant’s level of confidence does not always reflect the informant’s true knowledge (Tenney et al, 2007, 2011; Huh et al, 2019). Yet, many studies have shown that, warranted or not, children on average prefer to learn from those who show confidence rather than hesitancy (Sabbagh and Baldwin, 2001; Jaswal and Malone, 2007; Birch et al, 2010; Brosseau-Liard and Poulin-Dubois, 2014; Matsui et al, 2016), and adults likewise tend to use a person’s confidence when evaluating their credibility (e.g., Whitley and Greenberg, 1986; Brewer and Burke, 2002).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Individual Differences in Children’s Preference to Learn From a Confident Informant

et al. 2019

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Past research has demonstrated that children can use an informant’s confidence level to selectively choose from whom to learn. Yet, in any given study, not all children show a preference to learn from the most confident informant. Are individual differences in this preference stable over time and across learning situations? In two studies, we evaluated the stability of preschoolers’ performance on selective learning tasks using confidence as a cue. The first study (N = 48) presented children with the same two informants, one confident and one hesitant, and the same four test trials twice with a 1-week delay between administrations. The second study (N = 50) presented two parallel tasks with different pairs of informants and test trials one after the other in the same testing session. Correlations between administrations were moderate in the first study and small in the second study, suggesting that children show some stability in their preference to learn from a confident individual but that their performance is also influenced by important situational factors, measurement error or both. Implications for the study of individual differences in selective social learning are discussed.

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“…The main focus of this paper is on the pragmatic function of a part of speech 1 in Chinese -the SFP "ba", which researchers abroad seldom study. More specifically, this study drills down to children's final particles in both the Japanese (Matsui et al, 2016;Matsui & Yamamoto, 2013;Murasugi, 2013) and Korean (Clancy, 1989;Choi, 1991) language experiments and diaries from the perspectives of grammar and pragmatics. Studies in China found mostly in masters' dissertations (Li, 2005;Liu, 2009;Qian, 2003;Tao, 2012) and papers on pragmatics of children's SFPs are quite rare (Li, 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A case study of the sentence final particle “BA” ’s pragmatic functions in chinese-speaking children

Zhang

Wang

Elliott

2018

SAECJ

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The process of the language acquisition of children is reflected in two aspects; language structure and pragmatic functions. Data from "The Longtime Tracing Oral Corpus of Typical Development Children" (one child; 2,367 sentences) are analyzed. This study examines the child's sentence final particle (SFP) "ba", in which we focused on the intention of this word and concluding with the core pragmatic meaning and divided the different levels of "ba". In this way, we combined the different sentence types, the intentions of utterance, and the degrees of "undetermined intention" and researched on the pragmatic function of child's SFP "ba" in order to obtain the pragmatic acquisition of "ba" at the specific development period (1;12-4;01). The acquisition and development of children's language is the result of a combination of biological factors, discourse input, and cognitive ability.Finally, the enlightenment of the research conclusions on early childhood education are pointed out.

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Young children's early sensitivity to linguistic indications of speaker certainty in their selective word learning

Cited by 50 publications

References 37 publications

Selective learning and teaching among Japanese and German children.

Selective learning and teaching among Japanese and German children.

Individual Differences in Children’s Preference to Learn From a Confident Informant

A case study of the sentence final particle “BA” ’s pragmatic functions in chinese-speaking children

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