4 Imitation and norms
From a very young age infants are expert observers and imitators of others’ behaviour, from copying an adult sticking out their tongue to pretending to use a mobile phone (Meltzoff, 1988). This seemingly simple ability plays a crucial role in language acquisition.
This is because language is a classic example of a cultural norm – an arbitrary obligation between people, passed down from generation to generation, about the way something should be done. There is no inherent advantage to referring to that four-legged animal over there with the wagging tail as a ‘dog’ or ‘hund’ or ‘chien’, but there is an advantage is using the same (arbitrary) sign as everyone else. The advantage is people understand what you are talking about.
There are many other examples of cultural norms. There is no inherent advantage in driving on the left side of the road or the right, but there is an advantage in driving on the same side as everyone else. The key point is that the chance of an infant guessing any of these arbitrary meanings – just figuring out on their own that the sound ‘dog’ might mean that animal with the wagging its tail – are practically zero, they must be learned by imitating how everyone else is using those sounds. Knowing a language means sharing similar sound-meaning associations with other speakers.
What is interesting is how much we care about these norms. People do not just think that others can act, think and speak in a certain way, they ought to, and when norms are violated, children as young as 6 will act to reinstate them, even at a cost to themselves (McAuliffe, Jordan and Warneken, 2015). Young infants are motivated to conform to norms because they are signals that ‘I am one of you’. 14-month olds, when organised into two arbitrary groups, are less likely to imitate peers from the other group (e.g. Buttelmann et al., 2013). In terms of language norms, 10-month-old infants prefer to play with toys presented by a speaker of a familiar language over toys presented by a speaker of an unfamiliar language (Kinzler et al., 2007). By 5 years old, both monolingual and bilingual children are more likely to befriend native-accented peers over foreign accented ones (Souza, Byers-Heinlein and Poulin-Dubois, 2013) and prefer to learn language from adults who ‘talk like me’ compared with foreign-accented ones (Kertesz et al., 2021).
This motivation to conform to norms is an important consideration in the linguistic generalisations that children make later on in development. While imitation is vital to language development infants do more than parrot back what adults say, as you learned about in Session 1. If they only imitated, they would not say things like ‘I went-ed to the shops’ or ‘he disappeared the rabbit’. This shows the tension in language learning between needing to conform to the norms but also be creative within them.