Adult recipients are understood to be active participants in conversation who co-construct talk using feedback signals. However, the ways in which children produce feedback to signal their active participation in interaction remain underexplored in developmental pragmatics. To address this gap, this paper presents an initial exploration of children’s use of multimodal feedback signals based on video corpora recorded in naturalistic contexts across four linguistically and culturally diverse settings: Datooga (Tanzania), Qaqet (Papua New Guinea), Bolivian Amazonian Spanish (Bolivia), and American English (USA). This study provides exploratory evidence of young children’s feedback behavior within social interactions across cultures, and suggests differences in comparison to adults’ multimodal feedback behaviors. Our findings reveal that young children (aged 2–6 years) produce less feedback than adults, suggesting a potentially higher tolerance for non-progressivity and breakdowns in interaction. They appear to make fewer explicit attempts to signal shared understanding or to indicate that they are monitoring their interlocutor’s speech. Nonetheless, children across our sample do provide feedback: they produce some non-repair feedback and employ repair initiators. Our observations indicate that young children use multimodal practices in the production of feedback signals significantly less often than adults. Given the overall research gap in the developmental literature, we provide tentative explanations for the observed patterns and their implications for cognitive development. Integrating insights from developmental psychology, we propose, among other things, that children’s use of non-repair feedback relates to the development of Theory of Mind, as these practices require a nuanced understanding of others’ mental states. On the other hand, the limited use of embodied practices in children’s feedback production hints at the progressive development of multimodal languaging in children. These findings contribute to our understanding of cognitive development and language acquisition, shedding light on the development of multimodal interactional mechanisms in childhood.
Studies have shown that children evaluate collective rewards as relatively fair. However, it is unclear whether children reward non-intervening bystanders when asked to judge bystanders and reward-deserving agents separately. This study examined whether children’s rewarding of bystanders who belong to the same group as reward-deserving agents but do not intervene in a helping situation varies with the relationship between the bystanders and helpers, viewed in terms of entitativity. Children aged 6–8 years (N = 72) were assigned to one of three conditions: baseline, low entitativity, and high entitativity. In all conditions, the bystander did not intervene in the interaction between the helper and recipient. In the baseline condition, the bystander had no relationship with the helper. In the low entitativity condition, the bystander and helper wore clothes of the same color, indicating that they belonged to the same group. In the high entitativity condition, the bystander and helper also wore clothes of the same color, interacted, and shared the goal of helping the recipient. The results showed that children gave fewer rewards to the bystander than to the recipient and helper irrespective of condition. However, children gave more rewards to the bystander in the high entitativity condition than in the baseline condition. Additionally, the bystander in the high entitativity condition was evaluated more positively than the bystander in the baseline and low entitativity conditions. These findings suggest that children adjust their moral evaluations of bystanders in prosocial contexts depending on cues associated with entitativity between the bystander and helper.
Imitation is a fundamental mechanism of cultural learning, but its underlying cognitive mechanisms remain highly debated. For example, nativist accounts argue that imitation is based on domain-specific learning mechanisms, but empiricist accounts argue that it is based on domain-general learning mechanisms. The present longitudinal study investigated the interplay between imitation and general cognitive abilities across the second year of life. A sample of 143 German children was tested at 12, 18, and 24 months of age. Imitation was measured using the Frankfurt Imitation Test, and cognitive development was measured using the Cognitive Scale of the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development III. Cross-lagged panel modeling was employed to examine bidirectional associations between imitation behavior and cognitive abilities. Results indicated moderate stability in cognitive abilities across measurements, whereas imitation behavior showed no temporal stability. Critically, cognitive abilities at 18 months significantly predicted imitation at 24 months, but no reverse effects were found. Overall, the findings provide limited and non-systematic support for a predictive relationship between domain-general cognitive abilities and imitation. Although the observed predictive effect is consistent with empiricist accounts emphasizing general learning mechanisms, the lack of significant associations across measurement time points suggests that imitation may not be linked solely to general cognitive development. These results highlight the importance of considering both domain-general and domain-specific contributions to imitation and underscore the need for future research to systematically control for cognitive developmental status when investigating early social-cognitive abilities.
Children and adults often learn through imitation, sometimes even reproducing actions that are unnecessary for achieving an instrumental goal. This phenomenon, known as over-imitation, can reflect social (affiliative or normative) motives but also mistaken causal beliefs. Only the former requires recognition that an action is unnecessary for achieving the instrumental goal. To discern between social and causal motives for over-imitation, it is therefore important to understand how individuals determine whether an action is functionally necessary or unnecessary. In two eye-tracking studies, we examined how urban German children (n = 48) and adults (n = 47) use action features to judge whether an action is causally necessary or unnecessary for achieving a goal. We found that both age groups struggled to recognize pseudoinstrumental actions—unnecessary actions that involve physical contact with the object and thus seem causally plausible at first sight—as unnecessary, relative to ritualistic actions, which involve no such contact. Children copied pseudo-instrumental actions more frequently than adults, suggesting that adults may invest more cognitive effort into evaluating the causal relevance of an action. With increasing age, over-imitation thus appears to become more selective and deliberate.
