Chinese Infants' Ability To Understand Conventional And Non-Conventional Behaviours

Infants' social world is full of a range of human behaviours that they must correctly interpret in order to make sense of their surroundings.One key distinction that infants must learn to make is between conventional and non-conventional behaviours.Conventional behaviours are those that can be generalized across individuals such as the way words are used in different languages.In contrast,non-conventional behaviours such as obj ect preferences are rather person-specific thus cannot be generalized across people.The ability to distinguish between these two forms of human behaviours facilitates the learning of culturally relevant information and also promotes more successful social interactions(Graham et al.,2006).Past literature that mainly focused on infants in the English-speaking community indicates that infants have a basic understanding of both conventional and non-conventional human behaviours.For example,infants expect different people to use the same word to refer to the same object but do not expect different individuals to share their preferences for a particular object(Henderson&Woodward,2012).However,there remained several open questions in the existing literature regarding whether infants understand more complex aspects about the generalization of conventional and non-conventional behaviours.Also no studies had examined the understanding of conventional and non-conventional behaviours in infants in the Chinese community.The present study addressed these open questions and explored whether 12 to 15-month-old Chinese infants appreciate that while people can use the same word to refer to obj ects of like kind,their preference for a particular kind of objects may not be shared.The present study consisted of five experiments.Experiment 1 and 2 focused on Chinese infants' understanding of conventional behaviour.Experiment 1 examined infants'understanding of the language convention that different people should generalize words in a consistent manner.It was found that infants expected two people to generalize a word to obj ects of the same kind.This is the first evidence demonstrating that Chinese infants perceive word generalization as a form of shared convention.Experiment 2 explored whether infants'language development and learning environment(measured by a Chinese communication development inventory)had an impact on their appreciation of the conventional nature of language.Results showed that the average time spent communicating with adults was positively correlated with infants' understanding of language conventionsExperiment 3 and 4 focused on infants' understanding of the non-conventional aspect of human behaviours.Experiment 3 explored infants' understanding of the generalizability of obj ect preferences.Results indicated that infants appreciate that although a person's preference can be generalized to objects of like kind,this preference does not necessarily generalize to another individual whose preference is unkown.As a control study,Experiment 4 removed part of the questioning procedure in Experiment 3 and replicated the results of Experiment 1 Together,the findings from these two experiments provide the first known evidence that 12 to 15-month-olds expect obj ect preferences to be generalized across obj ects of like kind but not necessarily across individuals.Moreover,the findings that infants initiated different reactions to people's conventional and non-conventional behaviours further demonstrate that they can indeed differentiate these two forms of behavioursExperiment 5 was conducted as another control study.It confirmed that 12 to 15-month-olds could differentiate two objects that are of the same kind but in different colour.This control study hence reveals that infants can generalize information across obj ects of like kind based on whether the information is conventional or non-conventional in natureIn sum,the present study investigated Chinese infants' appreciation of the conventional and non-conventional aspects of human behaviour.The main results indicate that apart from the basic knowledge,Chinese infants can also understand more complex rules regarding the generalization of words and personal preferences.They are also able to distinguish between these two forms of behaviours and change their behaviours accordingly.Such sensitivity to the rules guiding conventional and non-conventional behaviours could help infants to selectively acquire culture relevant information and enhance their social skills.