CHILD DEVELOPMENT PERSPECTIVES
Children’s Assumption of the Conventionality
of Culture
Gil Diesendruck1 and Lori Markson2
1
Bar-Ilan University and 2Washington University
ABSTRACT—Humans
are cultural animals, enveloped in the
arbitrary norms, practices, and symbols—or conventions—unique to a particular community of people. The
adaptive value for children of recognizing such cultural
conventions is indisputable, raising critical questions concerning how they do so. This article first reviews the extant
evidence indicating that from early in life, young children
appreciate that certain socially available knowledge is
known only by members of their cultural community. It
then discusses 2 possible accounts of the development of
such an assumption and outlines certain challenges facing
those accounts. The article concludes by suggesting some
directions for future work that are grounded in a sociocognitive approach to cultural acquisition.
KEYWORDS—conventions;
culture;
acquisition;
social
cognition
Humans are cultural animals. From the moment babies are born,
they are surrounded by norms, practices, and symbols that are
mostly arbitrary and often unique to a particular community of
people. These are neither laws of nature nor idiosyncrasies of
parents; rather, they are ‘‘habits’’ established historically and
enforced by conventions. Yet the value of recognizing these conventions is undeniable. Children need to know, and hold the
expectation that others know, what words to utter in order to
express certain concepts, what objects to use to accomplish distinct functions, and how to respond appropriately to various gestures, symbols, and contexts. Moreover, children need to know
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Gil
Diesendruck, Department of Psychology and Gonda Brain Research
Center, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan 52900, Israel; e-mail:
[email protected].
ª 2011 The Authors
Child Development Perspectives ª 2011 The Society for Research in Child Development
DOI: 10.1111/j.1750-8606.2010.00156.x
with whom it is appropriate to communicate or interact using
these particular forms.
Unfortunately for children, information available in the environment does not come tagged as being cultural. Consequently,
children cannot know a priori who shares with them knowledge
about such information. Some of the information is universal,
applies to all events, and is known by all people (e.g., animals
die); some of the information is idiosyncratic and known only by
a few people (e.g., the family cat’s name is ‘‘Fausto’’); and other
information applies more broadly and is known by a community
of people (e.g., any animal like Fausto is called by English
speakers a ‘‘cat’’). The imperative for identifying this last—cultural—type of information, on the one hand, and its semantic
and epistemic indefiniteness, on the other, poses an immense
and critical learning puzzle for children.
The growing literature on the development of assumptions
about cultural conventions addresses precisely this puzzle. In
this article, we review the relevant literature and conclude that,
from early in life, children hold distinct assumptions about who
shares with them the socially available knowledge they have. We
then discuss some challenges facing accounts of how children
derive these assumptions and suggest directions for future theorizing and empirical work.
CHILDREN’S ASSUMPTION OF CONVENTIONALITY
Building on the conceptual work of Lewis (1969), we define conventions as forms that are (a) socially conveyed (as opposed to
naturally available), (b) cognitively opaque (as opposed to selfevident), (c) arbitrary (as opposed to objectively true), (d) community-bound (as opposed to idiosyncratic or universal), and (e)
prescriptively powerful within the community (as opposed to
completely flexible). These characteristics help highlight the
challenge children face when determining the scope of an
assumption of conventionality. Universal information lies at one
end of a spectrum: It is usually naturally available, self-evident,
and objectively true. For instance, to the extent that animals are
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Gil Diesendruck and Lori Markson
found around the globe, the knowledge that animals die becomes
available to all observers. Children are thus justified to be liberal
in assuming that all people know this type of information. Idiosyncratic information lies at the other end: Its availability is limited, and it is completely arbitrary. Only people who know
Fausto’s owners would know the cat’s name. With this form of
information, children are justified in being very conservative in
their assumptions about who shares it. Conventional information
represents a middle ground for liberal and conservative assumptions regarding the distribution of knowledge. On the one hand,
it is somewhat general insofar as it is presupposed to be known
by members of a cultural community. On the other, it is arbitrary
in the sense that people from different cultures may hold different conventions. The question, thus, is whether and how children
decide which pieces of information they are exposed to fall
within this gray area.
A number of recent studies, in fact, indicate that, from early
in life, children do manifest such an understanding of conventionality (see Kalish & Sabbagh, 2007). Namely, children treat
certain forms as being shared knowledge among certain people.
As will become clear, the criteria used by these studies as evidence for such an understanding vary—some having to do with
an understanding of the community-boundedness of the knowledge, and others, with its prescriptive force. Nonetheless, they
converge to the conclusion that children manifest an initial mapping of the domain of conventions.
What Is Conventional?
In Clark’s (1988, 1990) pioneering work on conventionality in
language, she argued that children operate under the assumption
that people know the names of objects, and thus if a person uses
a novel name in the presence of both familiar and novel objects,
children infer that the person likely does not have a familiar
object in mind. Experimental studies have shown that children
indeed draw this kind of inference (Markman & Wachtel, 1988).
The crucial question is whether they do so because they assume
that familiar names are shared knowledge. To address this question, a number of studies have manipulated the state of knowledge of participants in such contexts.
For instance, Diesendruck and Markson (2001) showed 3year-olds pairs of novel objects and taught them a novel common
name for one of the objects. For half of the children, the same
speaker who taught them the novel name later asked them for
the referent of a different novel name. For the other half, the referent requester was a different speaker, who had been absent
during the children’s exposure to the first novel name. Diesendruck and Markson found that children in both conditions
selected the object without a name as the referent of the second
novel name, and did so to the same extent in both conditions. In
other words, children drew the same inference about the referential intent of both speakers, arguably because they assumed that
both knew that the novel common name applied to one of the
objects. In fact, when explicitly asked, most children responded
that they thought that the speaker who been absent during their
exposure to the first novel name knew the novel name they had
been taught.
More recent studies indicate that even infants seem to hold
this assumption about object names. For instance, 19-month-olds
expect two different individuals to refer to a novel object with
the same name (Graham, Stock, & Henderson, 2006; Henderson
& Graham, 2005), and 13-month-olds—but not 9-month-olds—
are surprised if different individuals use the same name for two
different objects (Buresh & Woodward, 2007).
Importantly, children and infants do not hold such an assumption about all kinds of socially conveyed information. For
instance, by preschool age, children have different expectations
about people’s knowledge of common versus proper names. In
particular, children believe that only those who are familiar with
an individual entity (e.g., a pet), or have been exposed to its
proper name, may know the proper name of that entity (Birch &
Bloom, 2002; Diesendruck, 2005). Moreover, preschoolers do
not expect an absent speaker to know arbitrary facts about
objects that only they themselves have been taught (Diesendruck
& Markson, 2001), 19-month-olds do not generalize individual
preferences across people (Graham et al., 2006), and 9- and 13month-olds are not surprised if different people have different
goals (Buresh & Woodward, 2007). Thus, while common names
are thought to be conventional in the sense that they are treated
as shared knowledge across a community of people, other types
of information such as proper names, arbitrary facts, goals, and
preferences are not.
Children also treat other types of knowledge as conventional
in the sense that they have prescriptive force among members of
a community. In a series of studies, Rakoczy and colleagues
(Rakoczy, 2008; Rakoczy, Warneken, & Tomasello, 2008) taught
2- to 3-year-olds how to play a novel game, and then, in the critical conditions, children observed a new player (an experimenter) violate the previously established ‘‘game rules.’’ The
researchers found that even 2-year-olds would often explicitly
protest against the new player, explaining to him how the game
was supposed to be played. Such a response suggests that the
children (a) expected the new player to know the game rules and
(b) treated the game rules not as flexible choices but as social
conventions with prescriptive force within the participating
community.
Children seem to hold a similar expectation about object functions. On the one hand, when exposed to an adult using an object
for a given function, 2½-year-olds expect others to use that
object for the same function (Casler & Kelemen, 2005). By contrast, when instructed to solve a novel problem, 5-year-olds are
quite competent at using familiar objects in creative, nonconventional ways (German & Defeyter, 2000). As German and colleagues (Defeyter, German, & Hearing, 2009; German, Truxaw,
& Defeyter, 2007) noted, it seems that children hold an assumption of conventionality with regard to what objects are for but are
more flexible with respect to the actual uses of objects.
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Conventionality of Culture
In sum, it appears that from a young age, children (a) assume
that common object names, game rules, and objects’ intended
functions are types of information that are known and shared by
others, and (b) expect others to conform to this information. In
other words, children do not treat these types of information as
idiosyncratic. This generalizing tendency notwithstanding, as
discussed in the next section, children are not ‘‘blind’’ generalizers who expect the kinds of information listed above to be known
by all people. Rather, they uphold an assumption of conventionality only toward certain people.
Who Is Conventional?
In general, one should hold an assumption of conventionality
only toward members of one’s cultural community. They are the
ones who presumably share one’s language, artifacts, and customs. A study by Diesendruck (2005) indicates that in the
domain of language, children are aware of this stipulation by age
4. In that study, an experimenter taught Hebrew-English bilingual children an English novel name for one of two novel objects.
Then, either a bilingual Hebrew-English speaker or a monolingual Hebrew speaker asked children for the referent of a novel
Hebrew name. The rationale was that children should select the
unnamed object only in response to a speaker who they believe
knows a name for the other object. It was found that children did
so only in response to the bilingual speaker, implying they did
not believe the monolingual Hebrew speaker knew the name of
the object for which they had been taught an English name.
Children modulate the deployment of an assumption of conventionality based not only on categorical distinctions regarding
the sources of knowledge—for example, speakers of one’s language—but also on more context-specific distinctions. For
instance, young children prefer learning object names and functions for novel objects from people who have demonstrated
knowledge of conventional object names or functions than from
people who have demonstrated ignorance of them (Birch, Vauthier, & Bloom, 2008; Koenig, Clement, & Harris, 2004; Koenig &
Harris, 2005; Sabbagh & Baldwin, 2001). In fact, a speaker’s
prior record of reliability in object naming trumps other presumed markers of expertise such as age (Jaswal & Neely, 2006).
A recent study directly assessed whether a person’s record of
conventional knowledge affects not only children’s preference for
learning but also their decision as to whether to withdraw an
assumption of conventionality toward that person. In this study,
3- to 4-year-olds were exposed to agents who were either knowledgeable or ignorant of conventional object names or functions.
Children then had to draw an inference about the agent’s referential intent that required them to consider whether or not the
agent knew additional conventional object names or functions. It
was found that children’s inferences indeed varied according to
the agent’s prior record of conventional knowledge (Diesendruck,
Carmel, & Markson, 2010). Additional evidence consistent with
this conclusion comes from a study by Rakoczy, Warneken, and
Tomasello (2009), which found that 4-year-olds not only prefer
191
to imitate the rules of a game as enacted by a puppet who had
been previously accurate in his actions on objects but also
believe that the reliable puppet’s rules constitute the right way
to play the game.
Summary of Data
The picture emerging from the data reviewed above on the scope
of children’s conventionality assumption is that within a short
period of time, children create seemingly systematic boundaries
concerning what and who is assumed to be conventional. A crucial question this conclusion raises is: How do children accomplish this?
ACCOUNTING FOR CONVENTIONALITY: CHALLENGES
AND POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS
Two recent proposals suggest that children might start off with a
relatively promiscuous supposition of conventionality. One proposal builds on children’s widely documented limited theory-ofmind capacities, particularly their difficulty understanding that
others might have different representations of reality than they
themselves do (see Wellman & Liu, 2004; cf. Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005). According to Sabbagh and Henderson (2007), this
limitation in sociocognitive capacity may lead children to overattribute to others knowledge that they themselves have been
privy to. This claim is consistent with children’s difficulty tracing
the source of their own knowledge (Taylor, Esbensen, & Bennett,
1994) and their tendency to inflate their estimation of others’
knowledge of information after being exposed to it (the so-called
curse of knowledge; Birch & Bloom, 2003).
A second proposal derives from Csibra and Gergely’s (2006)
notion of a pedagogical bias. The argument is that adults have a
natural disposition to transmit knowledge to others, and do so by
ostensively making reference to information that is relevant in
the context. Crucially, in such pedagogical contexts, children
interpret the knowledge they are ‘‘taught’’ as general, insofar as
they take it to relate not only to particular instances or events
but to categories as well, and as universal, in the sense that they
interpret it not as unique to the individual who has taught them
but rather as known by everyone.
While these accounts highlight different factors contributing
to children’s assumption about the distribution of knowledge,
they concur that, early on, children assume that everything they
know, everybody knows as well. In light of the data reviewed
above, we believe that a full account of the development of an
assumption of conventionality needs to explain how children
come to uphold the assumption only toward some information
and some people. In other words, limited theory-of-mind abilities
or a pedagogical disposition may be taken to define children’s
default assumption. Nonetheless, the data indicate that from
early on, children narrow the scope of conventionality. In this
light, the theoretical challenge is to define the mechanisms that
allow the fine-tuning of these default biases.
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Gil Diesendruck and Lori Markson
One of the theoretical parameters the data establish is that
whatever acquisition mechanism underlies the fine-tuning of this
assumption, it needs to be in place and functioning reasonably
well within the first few years of a child’s life. A second is that in
addition to these potential upper-bound ontogenetic constraints
on the to-be stipulated mechanisms, there might also be lower
bound phylogenetic constraints. We began this article by stating
that humans are cultural animals. Archeological evidence suggests that they have been so—particularly as creators of conventional artifacts—for hundreds of thousands of years (Toth &
Schick, 2006). In fact, by some accounts, nonhuman primates
also show signs of learning and transmitting certain conventional
knowledge (Whiten, Horner, & de Waal, 2005), although it is
debatable whether they do so by the same means as human
infants do (Buttelmann, Carpenter, Call, & Tomasello, 2008).
Thus, whatever the acquisition mechanisms turn out to be, a
rudimentary form of them might be cognitively plausible for
nonhuman primates. Those in children, nonetheless, would be
qualitatively superior, corresponding with their presumably
unique social learning strategies, complex cultural systems, and
sophisticated assumptions about the distribution of knowledge
(Tomasello, 2009).
With these parameters in mind, and inspired by sociocognitive
approaches to the acquisition of culture (Callanan, Siegel, &
Luce, 2007; Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll, 2005),
we posit below a number of candidate cues children might use to
define the domain of conventionality. These are cues about how
people use certain forms—which should inform children about
what is conventional—and cues about who uses these
forms—which should inform children primarily who is conventional. To illustrate how the above-cited double constraints
should inform the conceptualization of the mechanisms, let us
take ‘‘sensitivity to intentionality’’ as a case in point. On the one
hand, the capacity to detect intentionality is arguably available
in both young human infants (Meltzoff, 1995; Woodward, 1998)
and primates (Call & Tomasello, 2008). On the other hand, there
seem to be qualitative differences between human children’s and
primates’ capacity to recruit intentional understanding for the
sake of social learning (Herrmann, Call, Hernandez-Lloreda,
Hare, & Tomasello, 2007).
Cues About What Is Conventional
As mentioned above, one of the most basic cues children likely
rely on to determine whether or not a form is conventional has to
do with the intentionality of the action in which the form is
embedded. Put simply, forms embedded in intentional acts are
candidates for being conventional. In particular, intentionality
helps distinguish between culturally bound acts and universal or
accidental acts. For instance, burping is a universal and frequently accidental act. However, in certain cultures, it is customary and even expected, and thus likely also done
intentionally. In fact, intentionality is a critical factor in children’s learning of cultural forms such as words (see Akhtar
& Tomasello, 2000; Baldwin, 1991; Bloom, 2000), artifact
functions (Bloom, 1996; Kelemen, 1999), communicative gestures (Campbell & Namy, 2003), and symbolic representations
(Bloom & Markson, 1998; Gelman & Ebeling, 1998). Recent
evidence indicates that the intentional nature of one’s use of
objects also affects children’s inferences about the shared nature
of objects’ functions (Casler & Kelemen, 2005; Wohlgelernter,
Diesendruck, & Markson, 2010).
A second cue children might rely on for defining what is conventional is the consistency with which the form is used, both by
the same person and across different people. The idea is that the
more consistently a form is used, the more likely that it manifests
a ‘‘correct’’ or ‘‘common’’ way to do or express something. Indeed,
recent studies show that children’s determination of what an
object is for is influenced by consistency both across individuals
(Siegel & Callanan, 2007) and within an individual (Wohlgelernter et al., 2010).
A third cue that children might rely on in determining the conventionality of a form is whether or not the action in which the
form is embedded involves coordination between individuals.
The hypothesis is that children will be more likely to treat forms
as conventional when their use by an individual depends on and
affects the actions of another individual. Some evidence for the
role of coordination in children’s assumption of conventionality
comes from the work on game rules described earlier (Rakoczy,
2008; Rakoczy et al., 2008). In these studies, when children
were tested in a condition in which the agent who violated one of
the game rules had not committed to participate in the game,
they tended to protest less. Furthermore, infants’ sensitivity to
eye contact as a cue to learning might derive from their interpretation of such a cue as a signal that they are engaging in a coordinated activity (Topal, Gergely, Miklosi, Erdohegyi, & Csibra,
2008).
A fourth and final cue has to do with pragmatic or semantic
indications offered by adults (Callanan et al., 2007). For
instance, Callanan and Sabbagh (2004) found that when interacting with their children, parents typically engage in labeling
strategies that may convey to children that there is a best way to
refer to objects (e.g., insisting on a single label for each object).
Callanan et al. (2007) noted that parents also seem to provide
children with subtle cues about the existence of preferred ways
for using certain objects, such as using a generic noun form to
describe object functions (e.g., ‘‘pens are for writing’’). In general, the use of generic language for describing events or objects
consistently leads even young children to consider the information as being generalizable across instances rather than unique
to the referent (Cimpian & Markman, 2009; Gelman, 2009).
Cues About Who Is Conventional
One of the cues children might use in determining whether or
not someone shares their conventions is the social category to
which the person belongs. For instance, children believe that
adults are knowledgeable about ‘‘adult’’ themes but that their
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Conventionality of Culture
peers are more knowledgeable about ‘‘kid’’ themes (VanderBorght & Jaswal, 2009). Moreover, even infants prefer to interact
with a speaker of their own language than with a speaker of a foreign language (Kinzler, Dupoux, & Spelke, 2007), and from a
young age, children selectively attend to same-gender individuals as models for learning (Ruble, Martin, & Berenbaum, 2006)
and preferences (Shutts, Banaji, & Spelke, 2010). This line of
work raises the possibility that the development of social categories aid children in recognizing relevant purveyors of conventional knowledge. For instance, an early differentiation between
in- and out-groups may be functionally adaptive not only for the
sake of identifying potential foes but also for recognizing potential ‘‘teachers.’’
Finally, children are sensitive to cues about people’s confidence in their use of a form when assessing the conventionality
of the form. In fact, children are influenced by both explicit
(Jaswal & Malone, 2007; Nurmsoo & Robinson, 2009; Sabbagh
& Baldwin, 2001) and nonverbal (Birch, Akmal, & Frampton,
2010; Fusaro & Harris, 2008) indications of ignorance.
193
of the arbitrariness of morality (Levy, Taylor, & Gelman, 1995;
Smetana, 1981) and categorization (Kalish, 1998; Rhodes &
Gelman, 2009).
CONCLUSIONS
Beginning early in development, children assume that certain
pieces of information to which they are exposed are shared by
members of their cultural community. This is a crucial developmental achievement because much of what children need to
know to function adaptively in the world is knowledge that is
socially dispensed and bound. One of the main challenges facing
researchers in this area is to define the ontogenetically—and
phylogenetically—plausible mechanisms that allow children to
distinguish knowledge that can be assumed to be shared by other
members of their cultural community from knowledge that is
either specific—and thus not generalizable across instances and
people—or global—and therefore applicable universally across
people. Answering these questions will bring us closer to an
understanding of what makes humans unique.
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
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This is a budding field, and much work still lies ahead. We have
listed a few of the capacities likely to influence the fine-tuning of
an assumption of conventionality. In most cases, the influence of
these capacities on conventionality has been tested in only one
or two domains. Evidently, to assess the potential of these capacities as explanations for the acquisition of an assumption regarding cultural conventions, more domains must be studied. A
related recommendation is that future studies attempt to assess
the discriminatory validity of the capacities. As noted earlier, for
example, intentionality may help differentiate between conventional and universal or accidental information. However, intentionality does not differentiate between conventional and
idiosyncratic information. For instance, proper names—which
are typically delivered intentionally—are not treated as conventional. This example also illustrates the need to assess the sufficiency of the cues. Again, while intentionality may not be
sufficient to discriminate between proper and common names,
intentionality + cross-individuals consistency might. Thus, children likely figure out the domain of conventionality by relying on
a unique combination of various cues.
A final recommendation for future research is to address further characteristics of conventions. Most of the studies conducted
thus far within this literature have focused on the fourth and fifth
characteristics of conventions we listed earlier—that is, that conventions are community bound and prescriptively powerful
within the community. It would be valuable for researchers to
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fact, in some cases, there are other literatures that may provide
helpful guidelines for such work. For instance, questions about
children’s understanding of the arbitrariness of cultural conventions can draw inspiration from work on children’s understanding
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