The Role of Linguistic Behaviors on Children's Reasoning about Other Informants

How does language switching influence children's reasoning about others as peers and informants?

This study is designed to take a cultural approach to studying the role of language switching in children's social preferences and epistemic reasoning. This study invites bilingual children between 4 and 6 years of age to participate in a fun 20 minute protocol with a storytelling phase followed by a series of questions about the stories they heard and the speakers who told them. Parents are also invited to complete a parent survey to help us better understand the kind of language environment children are exposed to. We are currently running this study with Arabic-English bilinguals in Lebanon, with plans to run it with Spanish-English bilinguals in the US as well.