Neighborhood linguistic diversity predicts infants’ social learning

Highlights

• Neighborhood linguistic diversity predicts infants’ imitation of foreign-language speakers.

• The infants included in the study heard only English from parents and caretakers.

• Family income and neighborhood population density did not affect infants’ imitation.

• The findings reveal unique effects of community diversity on infant learning.

Abstract

Infants’ direct interactions with caregivers have been shown to powerfully influence social and cognitive development. In contrast, little is known about the cognitive influence of social contexts beyond the infant’s immediate interactions with others, for example, the communities in which infants live. The current study addressed this issue by asking whether neighborhood linguistic diversity predicts infants’ propensity to learn from diverse social partners. Data were taken from a series of experiments in which 19-month-old infants from monolingual, English-speaking homes were tested in paradigms that assessed their tendency to imitate the actions of an adult who spoke either English or Spanish. Infants who lived in more linguistically diverse neighborhoods imitated more of the Spanish speaker’s actions. This relation was observed in two separate datasets and found to be independent from variation in infants’ general imitative abilities, age, median family income and population density. These results provide novel evidence suggesting that infants’ social learning is predicted by the diversity of the communities in which they live.

Introduction

Social environments powerfully shape early cognitive development. A large body of research has demonstrated that infants’ immediate social interactions with parents, teachers or caregivers influence diverse cognitive achievements, including language learning (e.g., Hoff, 2003, Huttenlocher et al., 2002, Rowe, 2012), spatial cognition (e.g., Pruden, Levine, & Huttenlocher, 2011), theory of mind (e.g., Meins et al., 2002), number knowledge (e.g., Levine, Suriyakham, Rowe, Huttenlocher, & Gunderson, 2010), and culturally-specified practices (see Rogoff, Paradise, Mejía Arauz, Correa-Chávez, & Angelillo, 2003). In contrast, little is known about the cognitive influence of social contexts beyond the infant’s immediate interactions with others. Dominant perspectives on early social cognitive development have stressed the central importance of infants’ direct interactions with social partners (e.g., Carpendale and Lewis, 2004, Csibra and Gergely, 2009, Dunn, 1988, Tomasello, 1998), and consequently there has been little investigation of the influence that distal social contexts may have. Nevertheless, infants routinely experience their broader neighborhood environment, for example, at the park, on the bus, or in the supermarket. Do these experiences affect their social cognitive development? In the current study, we investigated this issue by asking whether neighborhood linguistic diversity affects infants’ propensity to learn from diverse social partners.

One way in which neighborhood demographics could influence young learners is by shaping their openness to social informants. Recent findings indicate that infants and young children are discriminating social learners-they resist attending to and taking information from foreign or foreign-accented speakers (Buttelmann et al., 2013, Howard et al., in press, Howard et al., in preparation, Kinzler et al., 2011, Kinzler et al., 2007). Thus, from early in life, infants and young children appear to form expectations about the kinds of people that they should learn from and imitate. While this tendency could reflect a drive to acquire socially relevant knowledge (Henderson, Sabbagh, & Woodward, 2013), it could also restrict children’s access to potentially valuable information and contribute to the development of social biases.

We recruited data from 4 prior experiments with 19-month-old infants in order to evaluate whether neighborhood diversity mitigates this learning bias in infants. The 4 experiments were drawn from two sets of studies that examined age and medium effects on infants’ willingness to imitate informants who spoke their own native language (English) versus a foreign language (Spanish) (Howard et al., in press, Howard et al., in preparation). These studies found that infants and young children resisted foreign-speaking informants in some cases, but also found that, when presented with a live (rather than video) informant, 19-month-old infants were equally likely to imitate the actions of Spanish- and English-speaking experimenters. In the analyses presented here, we pooled data from these experiments to evaluate whether variation in neighborhood linguistic diversity predicted infants’ responses to the foreign speaker. We selected infants who heard only English in their interactions with caretakers. These infants lived in neighborhoods with varying degrees of linguistic diversity. By examining the relation between neighborhood linguistic diversity and infants’ propensity to imitate the foreign speaker, we were able to test whether language information available outside of the home affects infants’ social learning. That is, these experiments provided the opportunity to isolate the potential effects of the social environment beyond the child’s immediate interactions with caretakers and family members.