Children depend on others to learn language, to learn how to act in culturally appropriate ways, and to learn to engage with the physical environment effectively. A great deal of current research has focused on identifying the aspects of social interaction that foster these kinds of learning. Some theorists have proposed that child-directed interactions are critical. In these interactions, the adult and child engage together in visual attention while the adult directly addresses the child to communicate relevant information (e.g., the name of an object, or the proper use of an artifact). These interactions have been argued to be the critical foundation from which human social learning and culture emerge. Support for this conclusion comes from findings demonstrating that children show enhanced attention and learning when they are directly engaged by adults as compared to when they simply observe an adult's actions. However, these findings come exclusively from cultural populations where children are regularly engaged in directed interactions by caregivers. Thus, it is unknown 1) whether directed communication is a universal feature of early learning environments or is particular to certain communities and, 2) whether children's heightened proclivity to learn from directed interaction is a universal constant, or simply corresponds to the typical day-to-day experiences that children growing up in some communities have.
The proposed studies will address these issues by exploring the presence of child directed communication, and its role in informing early learning for 18-month-old children from two cultural communities: A Yucatec Mayan community, where children may have many opportunities to observe others, and a U.S. community, where children may regularly experience directed interactions with caregivers. If directed interactions are critical for early social learning, then children in each culture should show heightened learning from directed versus observed experiences regardless of the prevalence of directed interactions in their own experience. Alternatively, if children's social learning is shaped by their regular social experience, Mayan children may show heightened learning in response to observed models, and even U.S. children's ability to learn from observed models may vary as a function of variation in their opportunities to observe others' actions. These studies will provide a strong test of whether child directed interactions are, in fact, the cradle of human social learning, or whether, instead, early social learning is a more flexible process, driven by the broader ability to understand others' intentional actions, and shaped by regularities in the child's social experience.
This research program will be the first to test the relation between cultural experience and early learning from directed interaction and from observation. As such, it is uniquely positioned to answer questions about the relative importance that direct engagement has for early learning. This understanding is critical for informing theoretical accounts of early development, as well as for shaping policy decisions regarding the most effective means to teach children who come from diverse environmental backgrounds. Further, the proposed studies will develop a set of experimental paradigms that can be used across different cultural communities, setting the stage for future comparative work on early development in populations that have not been heavily studied before.
