Despite its recognized importance for cultural transmission, little is known about the role imitation plays in language learning. Three experiments examine how rates of imitation vary as a function of qualitative differences in the way language is used in a small indigenous community in Oaxaca, Mexico and three Western comparison groups. Data from one hundred thirty-eight 3- to 10-year-olds suggests that children selectively imitate when they understand the function of a given linguistic element because their culture makes frequent use of that function. When function is opaque, however, children imitate faithfully. This has implications for how children manage the imitation-innovation trade-off, and offers insight into why children imitate in language learning across development.
Children employ multiple cues to identify the referent of a novel word. Novel words are often embedded in sentences and children have been shown to use syntactic cues to differentiate between types of words (adjective vs. nouns) and between types of nouns (count vs. mass nouns). In this study, we show that children learning Malay (N = 67), a numeral classifier language, can use syntactic cues to perform even finer-grained disambiguation-between count nouns. The manipulation of congruence between lexical and syntactic cues reveals a clear developmental trajectory: while 5-year-olds use predominantly lexical cues, older children increasingly rely on syntactic cues, such that by 7 years of age, they disambiguate between objects referred to with count nouns using syntactic rather than lexical cues.
This study examined the social-cognitive reasoning of 52 Chinese Malaysian preadolescents (9-12 years old; M = 11.02, SD = 0.94) and 68 adolescents (13-18 years old; M = 14.76, SD = 1.39) in resolving filial dilemmas within the personal and moral domain. Preadolescents deferred to parental authority, whereas adolescents endorsed filial obligation reasoning to justify compliance in the personal domain. Both appealed to filial obligation, pragmatic, or welfare and safety reasoning to justify compliance but fairness or rights reasoning to justify their noncompliance, for the moral issue. Distinctions between authoritarian and reciprocal filial piety reasoning were revealed. Findings demonstrated complex decision-making and cognitive reasoning processes among Chinese Malaysian adolescents as they negotiate their filial obligations and autonomy development.