Converbs, Medial Verbs, Clause Chaining and Related Issues

This volume grew out of a workshop on "Converbs, medial verbs, clause chaining and related issues" held at Leiden University on 8th December 2006, which was cosponsored by the Swiss National Science Fotmdation (SNF) project "Functional typology of Ethiopian languages" (no. 100012-\09306). That occasion brought together specialists working on a range of languages spoken in a circle that spans from New Caledonia via India to Ethiopia and Mozambique. All while struggling to find a common language to talk about phenomena that are so pervasive in our respective languages of investigation, our discussions greatly benefited from the pooling of experiences in fields between which scientific exchange is often obstructed by the boundaries of various traditions. Far from adhering all to one theory or perspective, we hope that bringing together the following articles in one volume will provide new data and insights for tile already lively discussion around converbs, medial verbs and related issues. We wish to thank the editorial board of the Frankfurter Afrikanistische Blatter for accepting this volume in their journal and for their willingness to publish articles that go beyond African languages. In the same vein, we wish to thank all contributors to this volume, and especially our non-Africanist colleagues that have crossed one or more continental and disciplinary divides by publishing in this journal. Special mention and thanks are due to Sascha Völlmin, who did the layout of the whole volume. Finally, we hereby gratefully acknowledge the financial and logistical support of the workshop by the Institute of African Languages and Cultures, Leiden, and the Swiss National Science Foundation

The development of human social learning across seven societies

D.B.M.H., E.C., M.S., S.S. and E.J.C.v.L. were supported by the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science. E.J.C.v.L. was furthermore supported in part by the ERC (grant agreement no. 609819, project SOMICS) and the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO).Social information use is a pivotal characteristic of the human species. Avoiding the cost of individual exploration, social learning confers substantial fitness benefits under a wide variety of environmental conditions, especially when the process is governed by biases toward relative superiority (e.g., experts, the majority). Here, we examine the development of social information use in children aged 4–14 years (n = 605) across seven societies in a standardised social learning task. We measured two key aspects of social information use: general reliance on social information and majority preference. We show that the extent to which children rely on social information depends on children’s cultural background. The extent of children’s majority preference also varies cross-culturally, but in contrast to social information use, the ontogeny of majority preference follows a U-shaped trajectory across all societies. Our results demonstrate both cultural continuity and diversity in the realm of human social learning.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe