Children's selective trust in native-accented speakers

Across two experiments, preschool‐aged children demonstrated selective learning of non‐linguistic information from native‐accented rather than foreign‐accented speakers. In Experiment 1, children saw videos of a native‐ and a foreign‐accented speaker of English who each spoke for 10 seconds, and then silently demonstrated different functions with novel objects. Children selectively endorsed the silent object function provided by the native‐accented speaker. In Experiment 2, children again endorsed the native‐accented over the foreign‐accented speaker, even though both informants previously spoke only in nonsense speech. Thus, young children demonstrate selective trust in native‐accented speakers even when neither informant’s speech relays meaningful semantic content, and the information that both informants provide is non‐linguistic. We propose that children orient towards members of their native community to guide their early cultural learning.