The pragmatic role of trust in young children's interpretation of unfamiliar signals.

ABSTRACT: What role does children's trust in communication play in their acquisition of new meanings? To answer, we report two experimental studies (N = 81) testing how three- to four-year-olds interpret the meaning of a novel communicative device when it is used by a malevolent and potentially deceptive informant. Children participated in a hiding game in which they had to find a reward hidden in one of two boxes. In the initial phase of the experiments, a malevolent informant always indicated the location of the empty box using a novel communicative device, either a marker (Study 1), or an arrow (Study 2). During that phase, 3- and 4-year-olds learned to avoid the box indicated by the novel communicative device. In the second phase of the test, the malevolent informant was replaced by a benevolent

SUBMITTER: Mascaro O 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6821092 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature