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

孩子们依靠他人学习语言，学习如何以符合文化的方式行事，并学会有效地与物理环境打交道。目前的大量研究都集中在找出促进这类学习的社会互动方面。一些理论家提出，儿童引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注意，而成年人直接与儿童交谈，以交流相关信息(例如，物体的名称，或人工制品的正确使用)。这些互动被认为是人类社会学习和文化产生的关键基础。支持这一结论的研究结果表明，与单纯观察成年人的行为相比，当儿童与成年人直接接触时，他们表现出更强的注意力和学习能力。然而，这些发现完全来自文化人群，在这些人群中，儿童经常参与照顾者的直接互动。因此，尚不清楚1)定向交流是早期学习环境的普遍特征，还是某些社区所特有的；2)儿童从定向互动中学习的倾向是普遍存在的，还是仅仅符合在某些社区长大的儿童的典型日常经历。拟议的研究将通过探索儿童定向交流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方面的作用来解决这些问题：尤卡泰克玛雅社区，在那里儿童可能有许多机会观察他人，而在美国社区，儿童可能经常与照顾者进行直接互动。如果定向互动对早期社会学习至关重要，那么无论定向互动在他们自己的体验中是否普遍存在，每种文化中的儿童都应该表现出从定向体验和观察到的体验中进行高度学习的能力。或者，如果儿童的社会学习是由他们常规的社会经验塑造的，玛雅儿童可能会表现出对观察到的榜样的高度学习，甚至美国儿童从观察到的榜样中学习的能力可能会随着他们观察他人行为的机会的不同而不同。这些研究将提供一个强有力的测试，以检验儿童指导的互动是否实际上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故意行为的能力驱动，并由儿童社会经验的规则塑造。该研究项目将首次测试文化经验与通过指导互动和观察的早期学习之间的关系。因此，它在回答有关直接参与对早期学习的相对重要性的问题方面具有独特的地位。这一理解对于提供早期发展的理论说明，以及制定关于教育来自不同环境背景的儿童的最有效手段的政策决策至关重要。此外，拟议的研究将开发一套可用于不同文化社区的实验范例，为今后对以前没有深入研究的人群的早期发育进行比较工作奠定基础。

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.