Where does language come from? The development of a naïve biological understanding of language.

We examined 3- to 10-year-old U.S. children's naïve biological beliefs about spoken language, probing developing beliefs about where language is located in the body. Experiment 1 (N = 128) introduced children to two aliens, each having eight parts: internal organs (brain and lungs), face parts (mouth and ears), limbs (arms and legs), and accessories (bag and hat). Participants were assigned to the Language condition (in which the aliens spoke two different languages) or the control Sports condition (in which the aliens played two different sports). We assessed children's reasoning about which parts were necessary to speak a language (or play a sport) by asking children to (a) create a new alien with the ability to speak a language (or play a sport) and (b) remove parts of an alien while preserving its ability to speak a language (or play a sport). In the Language condition, with age, children attributed language-speaking abilities to internal organs and face parts. In Experiment 2 (N = 32), a simplified language task revealed that 3- and 4-year-old children demonstrated a weaker, albeit present, biological belief about language. In Experiment 3 (N = 96), children decided at what point an alien would lose its ability to speak the language as the experimenter added or removed parts. Children attributed language-speaking abilities to specific internal organs and face parts (brain and mouth). We demonstrate that children believe that language is contained to specific parts of the body and that this "metabiological" reasoning increases with age.

Leadership, gender, and colorism: Children in India use social category information to guide leadership cognition.

Across the globe, women and racial minorities are underrepresented in leadership. We examined the development of 5-10-year-old children's leadership cognition in India, the world's largest democracy. This cultural context offered the opportunity to study the development of attitudes about gender and to extend examinations of children's conceptions of race to include colorism (the privileging of lighter skin). In Experiment 1, children completed a novel Election Task in which they saw a fictional class with 20 students varying in gender (boys, girls) and race/skin tone (darker-skinned South Asian [Dark-SA], lighter-skinned South Asian [Light-SA], Black, White). Children predicted who would be elected as President, Treasurer, Welcomer, and Notetaker. Children most often chose Light-SA and White students as President. When choosing Presidents, younger children showed an own-gender bias, but by age 9, both boys and girls primarily chose boy Presidents. Importantly, children's choices differed for the other class positions. Next, we asked children to draw a "leader." No boys drew a girl, and girls' drawings were mixed (52% drew girls). In Experiment 2, we replicated the drawing task findings and compared children's drawings of a leader to their drawings of a helper and a scientist. Children most often drew boys and men as leaders and scientists, but not as helpers, suggesting specificity of children's pro-male bias to male-stereotyped positions. Children's conceptions of leadership reflected a male bias and an association between lighter skin and status.

Children's language-based pedagogical preferences in a multilingual society.

A majority of the world's population is multilingual, yet children's language-based preferences have largely been studied in Western monolingual contexts. The present research investigated language-based preferences in 4- to 8-year-old children living in Hyderabad, India, a multilingual region with languages such as Telugu (official language of the state, and the native language of many children in the state) and English (medium of instruction in some schools). We presented to children novel objects and probed their selective preference to learn from different speakers (Telugu, British-accented English, or Indian-accented English). In addition, the current study assessed the flexibility of children's preferences by manipulating the learning goal (i.e., performance goal vs. enjoyment goal) and learning content (i.e., Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics [STEM] objects vs. cultural objects). Children showed a preference for both English speakers over Telugu speakers, a tendency that increased with age. This preference was especially pronounced for performance learning goals and for STEM learning content. Furthermore, children whose native language was Telugu showed a less pronounced English bias. The results of this study provide new insights into the development of language-based biases in multilingual environments. First, they highlight dual and intersecting considerations of speaker familiarity and speaker status in guiding children's choices about from whom to learn. Second, the results suggest that children's language-based preferences in a pedagogical setting are flexible, as children integrate social cues (e.g., language-based attitudes) as well as contextual cues (e.g., the learning goal) strategically. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Young children enlarge the pie: Antecedents of negotiation skills.

Negotiations are critical to interpersonal interactions, yet little is known about how the conceptual skills that support successful negotiations develop in childhood and across societies. Here, we presented 384 3-10-year-old children in the United States and India with tasks that measured children's understanding that people can value the same resources differently (Experiments 1-4) and that underlying interests motivate people's stated positions (Experiment 5). In Experiments 1 and 2, children participated in a third-person resource distribution task. Children distributed resources (candies) to two targets who valued resources differently: absolute preferences (liking A but disliking B) or relative preferences (liking both but preferring A to B). By age 5, children differentiated relative from absolute preferences. Experiments 3 and 4 presented a first-person variant of the same task. In trials involving a conflict in which both the child and the target preferred the same resource, U.S. children prioritized their own preferences, whereas Indian children prioritized the targets' preferences. In Experiment 5, all participants from the previous studies participated in an additional task in which two people wanted a single resource, an orange, but their interests differed-one wanted the pulp to make juice and one wanted the peel to make cake. With age, children increasingly proposed the value-maximizing option of splitting the peel from the pulp, rather than halving the orange. Notably, even the youngest Indian children chose the value-maximizing option. Our findings outline the development of two antecedents to successful negotiations and highlight the disparate role of self-interest across cultural contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).