Recent work has shown that preschoolers track informants’ past reliability concerning familiar information and labels, and they use this information to judge the correctness of novel information and labels they provide. But linguistic factors also sway children’s choices for social interaction, for which native-accented speakers are preferred. The present study uses the selective trust paradigm to consider how accentedness interacts with speaker reliability with native- and foreign-accented informants. The results show that speaker reliability and accentedness affect four-year-olds’ choices, but the impact of these factors differed by response type. Preschoolers preferred to ask the native-accented speaker for information, regardless of his reliability. However, in choosing which label to learn, preschoolers selected the reliable speaker’s label, regardless of accent, and correctly identified the unreliable speaker. This study provides evidence suggesting that young children separate their social biases from their objective assessment of novel information. / text

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Children must learn not to trust everyone to avoid being taken advantage of. In the current study, 5- and 7-year-old children were paired with a partner whose incentives were either congruent (cooperative condition) or conflicting (competitive condition) with theirs. Children of both ages were more likely to mistrust information spontaneously provided by the competitive than the cooperative partner, showing a capacity for detecting contextual effects on incentives. However, a high proportion of children, even at age 7, initially trusted the competitive partner. After being misled once, almost all children mistrusted the partner on a second trial irrespective of the partner’s incentives. These results demonstrate that while even school age children are mostly trusting, they are only beginning to spontaneously consider other’s incentives when interpreting the truthfulness of their utterances. However, after receiving false information only once they immediately switch to an untrusting attitude.