Cultural divergence in children's selective word learning: Korean and Canadian children differ in their trust of adult informants

Although children generally regard adults as more knowledgeable than their peers, an informant's past accuracy trumps age when in conflict. In a recent study, however, Korean 5-year-olds were more likely to trust a less accurate adult informant over a more accurate peer informant when learning new information. To examine whether such a pattern was attributable to the cultural influence of shaping early respect for the elderly among Korean children, a pattern of selective label endorsement was examined among Canadian 5-year-olds, who were raised under different cultural values, relatively putting less emphasis on social relationships than individual expressions (Experiment 1). We also investigated Korean 6-7-year-olds' selective endorsement pattern when the informant's past accuracy conflicted with the informant's age to examine how cultural influences shift as children develop (Experiment 2). When the adult was 25% accurate in labeling familiar objects, relative to the 75% accurate child informant, Canadian 5-year-olds tended to endorse the label offered by the child, demonstrating a prioritization of the epistemic cue over the social cue. By comparison, Korean 6-7-year-olds were equally likely to choose between two informants, showing difficulty disregarding inaccurate adults, even when they always mislabeled familiar objects. These results offer insight into cultural influences on the development of selective word learning and suggest the relative weighing of social and epistemic cues evolves with development.