Young children attribute normativity to novel actions without pedagogy or normative language
Abstract
Young children interpret some acts performed by adults as normatively governed, that is, as capable of being performed either
rightly or wrongly. In previous experiments, children have made this interpretation when adults introduced them to novel acts
with normative language (e.g. ‘this is the way it goes’), along with pedagogical cues signaling culturally important information,
and with social-pragmatic marking that this action is a token of a familiar type. In the current experiment, we exposed children
to novel actions with no normative language, and we systematically varied pedagogical and social-pragmatic cues in an attempt
to identify which of them, if either, would lead children to normative interpretations. We found that young 3-year-old children
inferred normativity without any normative language and without any pedagogical cues. The only cue they used was adult socialpragmatic
marking of the action as familiar, as if it were a token of a well-known type (as opposed to performing it, as if
inventing it on the spot). These results suggest that – in the absence of explicit normative language – young children interpret
adult actions as normatively governed based mainly on the intentionality (perhaps signaling conventionality) with which they are
performed.