Social interaction and social learning: A cross-cultural comparative study

儿童依赖他人学习语言，学习如何以文化上适当的方式行事，并学习有效地与物质环境接触。目前的大量研究都集中在确定促进这类学习的社会互动方面。一些理论家提出，儿童主导的互动是至关重要的。 在这些互动中，成人和儿童一起参与视觉关注，而成人直接向儿童传达相关信息（例如，对象的名称或工件的正确使用）。这些互动被认为是人类社会学习和文化出现的关键基础。 支持这一结论的研究结果表明，儿童表现出更强的注意力和学习时，他们直接参与的成年人相比，当他们只是观察一个成年人的行动。 然而，这些研究结果完全来自文化人口，儿童经常参与照顾者的直接互动。因此，目前尚不清楚1）定向沟通是否是早期学习环境的普遍特征，或者是特定的社区，2）儿童从定向互动中学习的高度倾向是否是一个普遍的常数，或者仅仅对应于在某些社区长大的儿童的典型日常经验。拟议的研究将通过探索儿童定向沟通的存在及其在为来自两个文化社区的18个月大的儿童提供早期学习信息方面的作用来解决这些问题：尤卡坦玛雅社区，儿童可能有很多机会观察他人，以及美国社区，儿童可能会经常与照顾者进行定向互动。如果定向互动对早期社会学习至关重要，那么每种文化中的儿童都应该表现出从定向与观察经验中学习的增强，而不管他们自己的经验中定向互动的普遍性如何。另一方面，如果儿童的社会学习是由他们的常规社会经验塑造的，玛雅儿童可能会对观察到的模型表现出更高的学习能力，甚至美国儿童从观察到的模型中学习的能力也可能会随着他们观察他人行为的机会的变化而变化。这些研究将提供一个强有力的测试，以确定儿童指导的互动是否是人类社会学习的摇篮，或者，相反，早期社会学习是否是一个更灵活的过程，由更广泛的理解他人意图行为的能力驱动，这项研究计划将首次测试文化经验和早期学习之间的关系从直接的互动和观察。 因此，它具有独特的地位，可以回答有关直接参与对早期学习的相对重要性的问题。 这种理解是至关重要的通知早期发展的理论帐户，以及塑造政策决定的最有效的手段来教孩子谁来自不同的环境背景。 此外，拟议的研究将开发一套实验范式，可用于不同的文化社区，为未来的比较工作奠定了基础，在人口的早期发展，以前没有得到大量的研究。

Children depend on others to learn language, to learn how to act in culturally appropriate ways, and to learn to engage with the physical environment effectively. A great deal of current research has focused on identifying the aspects of social interaction that foster these kinds of learning. Some theorists have proposed that child-directed interactions are critical. In these interactions, the adult and child engage together in visual attention while the adult directly addresses the child to communicate relevant information (e.g., the name of an object, or the proper use of an artifact). These interactions have been argued to be the critical foundation from which human social learning and culture emerge. Support for this conclusion comes from findings demonstrating that children show enhanced attention and learning when they are directly engaged by adults as compared to when they simply observe an adult's actions. However, these findings come exclusively from cultural populations where children are regularly engaged in directed interactions by caregivers. Thus, it is unknown 1) whether directed communication is a universal feature of early learning environments or is particular to certain communities and, 2) whether children's heightened proclivity to learn from directed interaction is a universal constant, or simply corresponds to the typical day-to-day experiences that children growing up in some communities have. The proposed studies will address these issues by exploring the presence of child directed communication, and its role in informing early learning for 18-month-old children from two cultural communities: A Yucatec Mayan community, where children may have many opportunities to observe others, and a U.S. community, where children may regularly experience directed interactions with caregivers. If directed interactions are critical for early social learning, then children in each culture should show heightened learning from directed versus observed experiences regardless of the prevalence of directed interactions in their own experience. Alternatively, if children's social learning is shaped by their regular social experience, Mayan children may show heightened learning in response to observed models, and even U.S. children's ability to learn from observed models may vary as a function of variation in their opportunities to observe others' actions. These studies will provide a strong test of whether child directed interactions are, in fact, the cradle of human social learning, or whether, instead, early social learning is a more flexible process, driven by the broader ability to understand others' intentional actions, and shaped by regularities in the child's social experience.This research program will be the first to test the relation between cultural experience and early learning from directed interaction and from observation. As such, it is uniquely positioned to answer questions about the relative importance that direct engagement has for early learning. This understanding is critical for informing theoretical accounts of early development, as well as for shaping policy decisions regarding the most effective means to teach children who come from diverse environmental backgrounds. Further, the proposed studies will develop a set of experimental paradigms that can be used across different cultural communities, setting the stage for future comparative work on early development in populations that have not been heavily studied before.