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

社会互动和社会学习：跨文化比较研究

• 批准号: 1226113
• 负责人: Amanda Woodward
• 金额: $ 34.99万
• 依托单位: University of Chicago
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2012-09-01 至 2016-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1226113&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Social; interaction; social; learning; cross

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.

孩子们依靠他人学习语言，学习如何以适当的文化方式行事，并学会有效地与身体环境互动。当前的大量研究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，指导儿童的互动至关重要。 在这些互动中，成年和儿童共同参与视觉关注，而成年人直接向孩子讲述相关信息（例如，对象的名称或适当使用伪像）。这些相互作用被认为是人类社会学习和文化的关键基础。 对这一结论的支持来自发现，表明儿童在成年人直接参与成年人时直接参与成年人的行为时会表现出增强的关注和学习。 但是，这些发现仅来自文化群体，儿童经常从事照料者的指示互动。因此，未知的是1）定向交流是早期学习环境的普遍特征还是对某些社区的特殊特征，以及2）儿童是否提高了从定向互动中学习的倾向是普遍的常数，还是简单地与某些社区成长的典型的日常经历相对应。拟议的研究将通过探索有指导性沟通的存在以及其在为来自两个文化社区的18个月大儿童提供早期学习方面的作用来解决这些问题：一个尤卡特克·玛雅社区（Yucatec Mayan Community），儿童可能有很多机会观察他人，以及一个美国社区，儿童可能会定期与护理人员进行定向互动。如果定向互动对于早期的社会学习至关重要，那么每种文化中的孩子都应从定向和观察的经验中表现出更高的学习，而不管他们在自己的经验中有指导性互动的普遍性。另外，如果儿童的社会学习是由他们的常规社交经验塑造的，玛雅儿童可能会对观察到的模型表现出更高的学习，即使是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而有所不同。这些研究将对孩子的社会学习的摇篮是否是人类社会学习的摇篮，或者早期社会学习是否是一个更灵活的过程，这是一个更加灵活的过程，这将提供深入的测试，这是由于更广泛的能力理解他人的故意行动，并由儿童社会经验中的规律性所塑造。 因此，它是独一无二的，可以回答有关直接参与对早期学习的相对重要性的问题。 这种理解对于向早期发展的理论叙述以及塑造有关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系列可以在不同文化社区中使用的实验范式，为将来的比较工作奠定了阶段，以对以前从未进行过大量研究的人群的早期发展进行比较。