Does the understanding of intentions in communicative acts depend on cultural socialization? A comparison of Chinese and German children.
More information about the project
Understanding indirect communication is an important prerequisite in everyday interaction with other people, because usually goals and intentions are not explicitly communicated. Rather, it is left to the observer to infer them from actions or utterances. For example, if a child asks his mother if he could have some cookies and the mother says, "We will have dinner soon," we understand that the mother wants to say with this utterance in this particular context that the child should not have cookies.
Previous studies found cultural differences in context sensitivity as well as communication comprehension. In order to test whether communicative intentions are more easily accessed by children in individualistic or collectivistic cultures, this research project adapted the paradigm of Schulze, Grassmann & Tomasello (2013) and conducted it with 4- and 6-year-old children in two cultural groups (German and Chinese children). In addition, context sensitivity was measured using an adapted version of the Ebbinghaus illusion and its influence on communication comprehension was investigated.
As expected, we found cultural differences in terms of context sensitivity, i.e., Chinese children were more influenced by the illusion context than German children, and 6-year-old children were also more context sensitive than 4-year-olds. In the communication task, 6-year-olds performed better than 4-year-olds in both cultures, and children understood direct communication better than indirect communication. In addition, context sensitivity influenced understanding of indirect communication. These results indicate that it is particularly important to consider context when we are confronted with indirect communication.
In addition, data on the German-speaking children's socio-economic background and the family's socio-cognitive engagement were collected and correlated with communication comprehension skills. The socio-economic background was represented by the educational level of the parents and their income, the socio-cognitive engagement was assessed by means of a questionnaire on activities that the parents do together with the child (e.g. reading aloud, doing puzzles, playing board games, etc.). Socio-cognitive engagement also took into account how many people live in the household, as households with more people may also provide more opportunities for socio-cognitive interaction.
Socio-cognitive engagement predicted children's communication skills, while educational background and parental income did not. This supports the assumption that communication is a highly social-cognitive task that children perform better the more frequently they engage in socio-cognitive interactions.
Related publications:
Schulze, C., Buttelmann, D., Zhu, L., & Saalbach, H. (2022). Context-sensitivity influences German and Chinese preschoolers’ comprehension of indirect communication. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 53(10), 1257–1276. https://doi.org/10.1177/00220221221104952
Schulze, C., & Saalbach, H. (2022). Socio-cognitive engagement (but not socioeconomic status) predicts preschool children’s language and pragmatic abilities. Journal of Child Language, 49(4), 839–849. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000921000295