Department of Psychology.
Dev Psychol. 2020 May;56(5):897-911. doi: 10.1037/dev0000915. Epub 2020 Mar 19.
When threatened with ostracism, children attempt to strengthen social relationships by engaging in affiliative behaviors such as imitation. We investigated whether an experience of ostracism influenced the extent to which children imitated a partner's language use. In two experiments, 7- to 12-year-old children either experienced ostracism or did not experience ostracism in a virtual ball-throwing game before playing a picture-matching game with a partner. We measured children's tendency to imitate, or align with, their partner's language choices during the picture-matching game. Children showed a strong tendency to spontaneously align with their partner's lexical and grammatical choices. Crucially, their likelihood of lexical alignment was modulated by whether they had experienced ostracism. We found no effect of ostracism on syntactic alignment. These findings offer the first demonstration that ostracism selectively influences children's language use. They highlight the role of social-affective factors in children's communicative development, and show that the link between ostracism and imitation is broadly based, and extends beyond motor behaviors to the domain of language. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
当受到排斥威胁时，儿童会通过模仿等亲和行为来加强社会关系。我们研究了被排斥的经历是否会影响儿童模仿同伴语言使用的程度。在两个实验中，7 到 12 岁的儿童在与同伴玩图片匹配游戏之前，要么在虚拟投球游戏中经历排斥，要么没有经历排斥。我们在图片匹配游戏中测量了儿童模仿或与同伴语言选择保持一致的倾向。儿童表现出强烈的自发与同伴词汇和语法选择保持一致的倾向。至关重要的是，他们词汇一致性的可能性受到他们是否经历过排斥的影响。我们没有发现排斥对句法一致性的影响。这些发现首次证明排斥会选择性地影响儿童的语言使用。它们突出了社会情感因素在儿童交流发展中的作用，并表明排斥和模仿之间的联系是广泛存在的，并且不仅限于运动行为，还延伸到语言领域。（PsycInfo 数据库记录（c）2020 APA，保留所有权利）。
