title: Children's selective trust in native-accented speakers.
abstract: Across two experiments, preschool-aged children demonstrated selective learning of non-linguistic information from native-accented rather than foreign-accented speakers. In Experiment 1, children saw videos of a native- and a foreign-accented speaker of English who each spoke for 10 seconds, and then silently demonstrated different functions with novel objects. Children selectively endorsed the silent object function provided by the native-accented speaker. In Experiment 2, children again endorsed the native-accented over the foreign-accented speaker, even though both informants previously spoke only in nonsense speech. Thus, young children demonstrate selective trust in native-accented speakers even when neither informant's speech relays meaningful semantic content, and the information that both informants provide is non-linguistic. We propose that children orient towards members of their native community to guide their early cultural learning.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, 5848 S. University Ave., Chicago, IL 60637, USA. kinzler@uchicago.edu
authors.forename: Katherine D
authors.initials: KD
authors.lastname: Kinzler
authors.forename: Kathleen H
authors.initials: KH
authors.lastname: Corriveau
authors.forename: Paul L
authors.initials: PL
authors.lastname: Harris
mesh_terms: D001290:Attitude; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D012938:Social Perception; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D035502:Trust