Language and Conventionality

The purpose of this research is to better understand how 18- to 20-month-old infants are making sense of people who behave in typical versus atypical ways with common objects and whether they have different expectations of how people will behave depending on whether they are part of their own language community or speak a foreign language. Specifically, participants will be presented with a linguistic ingroup (English speaker) and a linguistic outgroup (Chinese speaker) and will be shown these two speakers subsequently behaving in typical (conventional) and atypical (unconventional) ways with a cup or with a brush. We are interested in whether toddlers have different expectations about how people will behave with objects depending on if they are familiar or unfamiliar to them. Furthermore, our future goal is to compare their expectations of these social norms to moral behaviors like being helpful vs. harmful or fair vs. unfair.

Relevant publications:

Hunnius, S., & Bekkering, H. (2010). The early development of object knowledge: A study of infants’ visual anticipations during action observation. Developmental Psychology, 46(2), 446–454. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0016543

Sloane, S., Baillargeon, R., & Premack, D. (2012). Do infants have a sense of fairness? Psychological Science, 22, 196-204

Ziv, T., & Sommerville, J. A. (2017). Developmental differences in infants’ fairness expectations from 6 to 15 months of age. Child development, 88(6), 1930-1951.

Project Researchers