The role of accent and speaker certainty in children's selective trust

Abstract

Native English-speaking children prefer native English speakers over foreign-accented English speakers (Girard & Goslin, 2008; Kinzler et al., 2009; Kinzler et al., 2011). Young children also tend to distrust speakers who use uncertain language (e.g., “I guess,” “I’m not sure”) relative to those who use certain language (e.g., “I know, I’m sure”; Jaswal & Malone, 2007; Kim et al., 2012; Koenig & Harris, 2005). The present study asks how information about the speaker’s certainty interacts with the speaker’s accent. In particular, we asked whether speakers who are perceived as less reliable (foreign-accented individuals) are perceived as more reliable when they provide linguistic cues to certainty. We showed 89 typically developing monolingual native English-speaking 3- to 6- year-olds from North America pairs of videos in which two possible functions for a novel toy were introduced. We manipulated three variables: (1) whether the speaker introducing each function was a native- or foreign-accented English speaker; (2) whether the speaker expressed certainty or uncertainty about the function of the object; and (3) whether the experimenter who interacted with the child was a native- or foreign-accented English speaker. We found a strong preference to learn from native speakers, and found that this preference was impacted by the use of certain vs. uncertain language. These data are important for what they tell us about how children weigh different sources of information when deciding who to learn from. They are also of practical importance: if children are less likely to want to learn from foreign-accented speakers, then this has large implications for caregivers and educators.