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.