ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Infants' preferences for native speakers are associated with an expectation of information.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 43 papers.
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43 citing papers in PubMed.
- Body Knowledge and Emotion Recognition in Preschool Children: A Comparative Study of Human Versus Robot Tutors.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Facial affect and arousal as a complement to gaze measures in infant speech sound perception studies.Frontiers in neural circuits · 2025Article
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- The Quest for Truth: Experimenter Identity Impacts Children's Response to Surprising Information.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Infants evaluate informativeness of evidence and predict causal events as revealed in theta oscillations and predictive looking.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Theta activity and cognitive functioning: Integrating evidence from resting-state and task-related developmental electroencephalography (EEG) research.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2024Review
- Selective Action Prediction in Infancy Depending on Linguistic Cues: An EEG and Eyetracker Study.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Meaning as mentalization.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2024Review
- Ten-month-old infants' neural tracking of naturalistic speech is not facilitated by the speaker's eye gaze.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2023Article
- The Role of Talking Faces in Infant Language Learning: Mind the Gap between Screen-Based Settings and Real-Life Communicative Interactions.Brain sciences · 2023Review
- Linguistic identity as a modulator of gaze cueing of attention.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Gaze onsets during naturalistic infant-caregiver interaction associate with 'sender' but not 'receiver' neural responses, and do not lead to changes in inter-brain synchrony.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- How sociolinguistic factors shape children's subjective impressions of teacher quality.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2023Article
- Modulation of EEG theta by naturalistic social content is not altered in infants with family history of autism.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Electrophysiological correlates of perceptual prediction error are attenuated in dyslexia.Neuropsychologia · 2022Article
- Therapeutic Alliance as Active Inference: The Role of Therapeutic Touch and Synchrony.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Therapeutic Alliance as Active Inference: The Role of Therapeutic Touch and Biobehavioural Synchrony in Musculoskeletal Care.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2022Article
- Article
- Oscillatory activity and EEG phase synchrony of concurrent word segmentation and meaning-mapping in 9-year-old children.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2021Article
- Neighborhood racial demographics predict infants' neural responses to people of different races.Developmental science · 2021Article
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Abstract
Humans' preference for others who share our group membership is well documented, and this heightened valuation of in-group members seems to be rooted in early development. Before 12 mo of age, infants already show behavioral preferences for others who evidence cues to same-group membership such as race or native language, yet the function of this selectivity remains unclear. We examine one of these social biases, the preference for native speakers, and propose that this preference may result from infants' motivation to obtain information and the expectation that interactions with native speakers will provide better opportunities for learning. To investigate this hypothesis, we measured EEG theta activity, a neural rhythm shown to index active and selective preparation for encoding information in adults. In study 1, we established that 11-mo-old infants exhibit an increase in theta activation in situations when they can expect to receive information. We then used this neural measure of anticipatory theta activity to explore the expectations of 11-mo-olds when facing social partners who either speak the infants' native language or a foreign tongue (study 2). A larger increase in theta oscillations was observed when infants could expect to receive information from the native speaker, indicating that infants were preparing to learn information from the native speaker to a greater extent than from the foreign speaker. While previous research has demonstrated that infants prefer to interact with knowledgeable others, the current experiments provide evidence that such an information-seeking motive may also underpin infants' demonstrated preference for native speakers.
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