Sharing a language guides and constrains exploration and discovery in preschool children

Abstract

Children selectively acquire knowledge from reliable epistemic sources who provide them with relevant learning opportunities. This study investigated whether such selectivity extends to artefact learning and whether pedagogical cues restrict exploration depending on the teacher's linguistic group membership. Building on previous work which showed that pedagogy limits exploration, we compared how monolingual Hungarian 4‐ to 5‐ year‐old children explore a novel artefact with four different functions in two experimental conditions ( n = 30 each) and a baseline condition ( n = 18). Children in the experimental conditions observed a nonverbal, pedagogical demonstration of the target function either by a linguistic ingroup member or a linguistic outgroup member, whilst children in the baseline condition received no demonstration. Children learned the demonstrated function in both experimental conditions but not in the baseline condition. Exploration and discovery were most restricted when the teacher spoke their native language in comparison to when she spoke a foreign language. This conceptual replication extends previous findings by showing that relevance expectations (e.g., how ‘we’ do things) triggered by linguistic group membership cues, not teaching alone, constrain children's exploratory behaviour.