This research project was undertaken by Jisoo Oh, Narae Ju, Dr. Susan Graham and Dr. Youngon Choi. The study was supported by the Chung-Ang University Graduate Research Scholarship awarded to Jisoo Oh in 2021, funding from the Alberta Children's Hospital Foundation [501100003206] and an NSERC Discovery Grant awarded to Dr. Susan Graham. Many thanks all of the families who were involved in this project!
Imagine you received conflicting information from two different people about a topic you're unfamiliar with. How do you decide which person to trust? How do children make that choice?
Research shows that preschool children typically trust adults more than their peers. But when an peer is more accurate than an adult, preschoolers are more likely to trust their peer.
WORD LEARNING IN KOREA
However, a recent study in South Korea found some different results. When an adult was less accurate (3 errors out of 4) than a child (1 error out of 4), Korean 5-year-olds chose to learn from the less accurate adult. This surprised us and encouraged us to conduct our own study!
WHAT WERE OUR RESEARCH QUESTIONS?
Will 5-year-old Canadian children choose the more accurate preschool peer to learn new information?
Will Korean and Canadian children differ in their focus on age vs. accuracy in determining who to learn from?
HOW DID WE FIND THE ANSWERS TO OUR QUESTIONS?
Children were introduced to a child speaker and an adult speaker through a PowerPoint presentation on Zoom. Children saw familiar objects while the speakers named them, either with the correct name or an incorrect name. The child speaker named the objects correctly more often than the adult speaker.
Children then saw a novel object and listened to both speakers label the object with a different name. We then asked them what they thought the object was called.
WHAT DID WE FIND?
Unlike the South Korean study, Canadian children chose the name given by the child speaker more often than the name given by the adult speaker. This suggests that there are cultural differences in the way preschool children consider speakers' age and accuracy to decide from whom to learn!
The full study is available in Social Development for those who want a more-depth look at the research!
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