Developmental psychology

Psychology

Economics

Microeconomics

Cognitive psychology

Preference

Social preferences

Social psychology

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Significance This paper addresses the possible developmental origins of humans’ preference for native speakers. Infants’ preference to attend to someone speaking their native language is well documented and has been interpreted as a developmental precursor of our adult tendency to divide the social world into groups, preferring members of one’s own group and disfavoring others. Here we propose that this preference may originate from infants’ desire to acquire information and therefore preferentially interact with social partners who are more likely to provide them with relevant learning opportunities. We demonstrate that 11-mo-old infants indeed expect to receive information from native as opposed to foreign speakers, suggesting that infants’ selective social interactions may be driven by their motivation to learn.

Infants’ preferences for native speakers are associated with an expectation of information