Learning conventions and conventionality through conversation
Despite assumptions that children learn linguistic and behavioral conventions through socialization, a systematic account of this developmental process is lacking. We ask how well existing evidence supports a sociocultural account explaining how children learn what is conventional, and that meanings are conventional. Specifically, we consider empirical support for two hypotheses: that parents provide systematic cues regarding conventions and conventionality to children, and that children learn from these cues. Considering research involving conventional word meanings, object uses, and social behaviors, we find impressive support for both hypotheses. Parent-child conversations may support children’s expectation that people within a community tend to know and use the same words, and have similar knowledge and expectations. Finally we discuss ongoing controversies and future research ideas.
References (62)
Akhtar, N., & Menjivar, J. (2012). Cognitive and linguistic correlates of early exposure to more than one language. In J.B. Benson (Ed.),
Advances in Child Development and Behavior
, Vol.42. Oxford: Elsevier.
Bialystok, E., Craik, F.I.M., & Luk, G. (2012). Bilingualism: Consequences for mind and brain.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
, 16, 240–250.
Brennan, S.E., & Clark, H.H. (1996). Conceptual pacts and lexical choice in conversation.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
, 22, 1482–1493.
Buresh, J. & Woodward, A. (2007). Infants track action goals within and across agents.
Cognition
, 104, 287–314.
Callanan, M. (2000). Les noms d’objet dans les conversations entre parents et jeune enfants (Names for objects in conversations between young children and their parents).
Psychologie Française
, 45, 187–192.
Callanan, M., Akhtar, N., & Sussman, L. (2012).
Children Learning Words from Ostensive and Directive Speech
. Unpublished manuscript, University of California, Santa Cruz.
Callanan, M., & Jipson, J.L. (2001). Explanatory conversations and young children’s developing scientific literacy. In K. Crowley, C.D. Schuun, & T. Okada (Eds.),
Designing for Science: Implications from Everyday, Classroom, and Professional Settings
(pp. 21–49). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Callanan, M., Rigney, J., Nolan-Reyes, C., & Solis, G. (2012). Beyond pedagogy: How children’s knowledge develops in the context of everyday parent-child conversations. In A. Pinkham, T. Kaefer, & S. Neuman. (Eds.),
Knowledge Development in Early Childhood: How Young Children Build Knowledge and Why it Matters
. New York, NY: Guilford.
Callanan, M., & Sabbagh, M. (2004). Multiple labels for objects in conversations with young children: Parents’ language and children’s developing expectations about word meanings.
Developmental Psychology, 40,
746–763.
Callanan, M.A., Siegel, D., & Luce, M.R. (2007). Conventionality in family conversations about everyday objects. In M. Sabbagh & C. Kalish (Eds.),
New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development
(pp. 83–97). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Cimpian, A., & Scott, R. (2012). Children expect generic knowledge to be widely shared.
Cognition
, 123, 419–433.
Clark, E.V. (1992). Conventionality and contrast: Pragmatic principles with lexical consequences. In A. Lehrer & E.F. Kittay (Eds.),
Frames, Fields, and Contrasts
(pp. 171–188). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Clark, E.V. (1993).
The Lexicon in Acquisition
. Cambridge: CUP.
Clark, E.V. (2007). Conventionality and contrast in language and language acquisition.
New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development
, 115, 11–23.
Csibra, G., & Gergely, G. (2009). Natural pedagogy.
Trends in Cognitive Science
, 13(4), 148–153.
Diesendruck, G. (2005). The principles of conventionality and contrast in word learning: An empirical examination.
Developmental Psychology
, 41, 451–463.
Diesendruck, G., & Markson, L. (2001). Children’s avoidance of lexical overlap: A pragmatic account.
Developmental Psychology
, 37, 630–641.
Diesendruck, G., & Markson, L. (2011). Children’s assumption of the conventionality of culture.
Child Development Perspectives
, 5, 189–195.
Gauvain, M. (2001).
The Social Context of Cognitive Development
. New York, NY: Guilford.
Gelman, S. (2003).
The Essentialist Child
. Oxford: OUP.
Gelman, S. (2009). Learning from others: Children’s construction of concepts.
Annual Review of Psychology
, 60, 115–140.
Gelman, S., Coley, J., Rosengren, K., Hartman, E., & Pappas, A. (1998). Beyond labeling: The role of maternal input in the acquisition of richly structured categories.
Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development
, 63 (Serial No. 253).
German, T.P., & Johnson, S.C. (2002). Function and the origins of the design.
Journal of Cognition and Development
, 3, 279–300.
Grusec, J.E., & Davidov, M. (2010). Integrating different perspectives on socialization theory and research: A domain-specific approach.
Child Development
, 81, 687–709.
Harris, P.L., & Koenig, M.A. (2006). Trust in testimony: How children learn about science and religion.
Child Development
, 77, 505–524.
Hart, B., & Risley, T. (1995).
Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children
. Baltimore, MD: Brookes.
Henderson, A., & Graham, S.A. (2005). Two-year-olds’ appreciation of the shared nature of novel object labels.
Journal of Cognition and Development
, 6, 381–402.
Henderson, A., & Sabbagh, M. (2010). Parents’ use of conventional and unconventional labels in conversations with their preschoolers.
Journal of Child Language
, 37, 793–816.
Horner, V., & Whiten, A. (2005). Causal knowledge and emulation/imitation switching in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and children (Homo sapiens).
Animal Cognition
, 8, 164–181.
Huttenlocher, J., Haight, W., Bryk, A., Seltzer, M., & Lyons, T. (1991). Early vocabulary growth: Relation to language input and gender.
Developmental Psychology
, 27, 236–248.
Jaswal, V.K. (2004). Don’t believe everything you hear: Preschoolers’ sensitivity to speaker intent in category induction.
Child Development
, 75, 1871–1885.
Jaswal, V.K., & Neely, L. (2006). Adults don’t always know best: Preschoolers use past reliability over age when learning new words.
Psychological Science
, 9, 757–758.
Kalish, C.W., & Cornelius, R. (2007). What is to be done: Children’s ascriptions of conventional obligations.
Child Development, 78
, 859–878.
Kalish, C.W., & Lawson, C.A. (2008). Development of social category representations: Early appreciation of roles and deontic relations.
Child Development
, 79, 577–593.
Kalish, C.W., & Sabbagh, M.A. (2007). Conventionality and cognitive development: Learning to think the right way.
New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development
, 115, 1–10.
Kelemen, D. (1999). The scope of teleological thinking in preschool children.
Cognition
, 70, 241–272.
Kellman, P.J., Massey, C.M., & Son, J.Y. (2010). Perceptual learning modules in mathematics: Enhancing students’ pattern recognition, structure extraction, and fluency.
Topics in Cognitive Science
, 2, 285–305.
Kidd, C., White, K.S., & Aslin, R.N. (2011). Toddlers use speech disfluencies to predict speakers’ referential intentions.
Developmental Science
, 14, 925–934.
Kinzler, K., Corriveau, K., & Harris, P. (2011). Children’s selective trust in native-accented speakers.
Developmental Science
, 14, 106–111.
Koenig, M.A., & Harris, P.L. (2005). Preschoolers mistrust ignorant and inaccurate speakers.
Child Development
, 76, 1261–1277.
Koenig, M.A., & Woodward, A.L. (2010). 24-month-olds’ sensitivity to the prior inaccuracy of the source: Possible mechanisms.
Developmental Psychology
, 46, 815–826.
Lewis, D.K. (1969).
Convention: A Philosophical Study
. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lieven, E.V.M. (1994). Crosslinguistic and crosscultural aspects of language addressed to children. In C. Gallaway & B.J. Richards (
Eds
.),
Input and Interaction in Language Acquisition
(pp. 56–73). Cambridge: CUP.
Luce, M., & Callanan, M. (2010). Parents’ object labeling: Possible links to conventionality of word meaning?
First Language
, 30, 270–286.
Matthews, D., Lieven, E., & Tomasello, M. (2010). What’s in a manner of speaking? Children’s sensitivity to partner-specific referential precedents.
Developmental Psychology
, 46, 749–760.
Meltzoff, A. (1995). Understanding the intention of others: Re-enactment of intended acts by 18-month-old children.
Developmental Psychology
, 31, 838–850.
Nucci, L. & Weber, E.K. (1995). Social interactions in the home and the development of young children’s conceptions of the personal.
Child Development
, 66, 1438–1452.
Perez-Granados, D.R. (2002). Normative scripts for object labeling during a play activity: Mother-child and sibling conversations in Mexican-descent families.
Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences
, 24, 164–190.
Rakoczy, H., Tomasello, M., & Striano, T. (2005). On tools and toys: How children learn to act on and pretend with ‘virgin’ objects.
Developmental Science
, 8(1), 57–73.
Rogoff, B. (2003).
The Cultural Nature of Human Development
. Oxford: OUP.
Rogoff, B., Paradise, R., Mejía Arauz, R., Correa-Chávez, M., & Angelillo, C. (2003). Firsthand learning through intent participation.
Annual Review of Psychology
, 54, 175–203.
Sabbagh, M., & Baldwin, D. (2001). Learning words from knowledgeable versus ignorant speakers: Links between preschoolers’ theory of mind and semantic development.
Child Development
, 72, 1054–1070.
Sabbagh, M., & Henderson, A. (2007). How an appreciation of conventionality shapes early word learning.
New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development
, 115, 28–38.
Sabbagh, M.A., & Shafman, D. (2009). How children block learning from ignorant speakers.
Cognition
, 112, 415–422.
Saffran, J.R., Aslin, R.N., & Newport, E.L. (1996). Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants.
Science
, 274, 1926–1928.
Schieffelin, B. & Ochs, E. (1986).
Language Socialization across Cultures
. Cambridge: CUP.
Siegel, D.R. (2010).
Parent-Child Interactions with Artifacts in Everyday Activities
. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz.
Siegel, D.R., & Callanan, M.A. (2007). Artifacts as conventional objects.
Journal of Cognition and Development
, 8, 182–203.
Silva, K. (2011).
Teaching Children through “Little Dramas”: Opinions about Instructional Ribbing from Mexican-heritage and European-American Mothers
. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz.
Tennie, C., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2006). Push or pull: Imitation vs. emulation in great apes and human children.
Ethology
, 112, 1159–1169.
Tomasello, M. (1999).
The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition
. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Turiel, E. (1983).
The Development of Social Knowledge: Morality and Convention
. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
Fuoco, Julia, Nina Howe, Sandra Della Porta & Hildy S. Ross
2024.
“You Have to Do It Like the Duckies Hatch Their Egg”: Parent and Sibling Teaching of Conceptual and Procedural Knowledge in Early Childhood.
Early Education and Development 35:4
► pp. 766 ff.
Cekaite, Asta
2023.
Child Pragmatic Development. In
The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics,
► pp. 1 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 19 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.