Acquisition of moral language

[Gordon Ingram]

Hi Andrea,

There is obviously a wealth of literature out there on the acquisition 
of morality. Not sure how much the student has looked at so far, but a 
good place to start might be one of the handbooks of moral development, 
e.g.:

Killen, M., & Smetana, J. G. (Eds.). (2006). /Handbook of moral 
development/. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Being a philosopher he may already be familiar with the work of Shaun 
Nichols, who included a really well-written and accessible review of the 
literature on moral development as part of his theory of normative 
evolution:

Nichols, S. (2004). /Sentimental rules: On the natural foundations of 
moral judgment/. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 From the standpoint of the development of everyday moral discourse, I 
think not so much has been done, but there was recently a nice little 
study using the CHILDES corpus:

Wright, J. C., & Bartsch, K. (2008). Portraits of early moral 
sensibility in two children's everyday conversations./ Merrill-Palmer 
Quarterly, //54/, 56-85.

Two experimental studies that may be relevant are Harris and Núñez 
(1996), who showed that 3-4-year-old children were better at identifying 
violations of permission rules than violations of description rules, and 
Rakoczy, Warneken and Tomasello (2008), who showed that 2-3-year-old 
children were quite ready to make normative protests about violations of 
novel rules for made-up games (e.g., "daxing") that they had only just 
been taught:

Harris, P. L., & Núñez, M. (1996). Understanding of permission rules by 
preschool children./ Child Development, //67/, 1572-1591.

Rakoczy, H., Warneken, F., & Tomasello, M. (2008). The sources of 
normativity: Young children's awareness of the normative structure of 
games./ Developmental Psychology, //44/, 875-881.

Hope this helps somewhat, and apologies for the randomness of this 
selection: it is mostly stuff I cited while writing a paper that I just 
spent the last few days finishing off (which is why I couldn't reply 
earlier). I can also send you that paper if it would be of interest - it 
is on young children's everyday reports of norm violations by peers in 
preschool settings.

Best regards,
Gordon

Gordon Ingram
Institute of Cognition and Culture
Queen's University Belfast
Tel: +44 28 9097 1340
Mob: +44 7973 136820
http://www.qub.ac.uk/icc


Andrea wrote:
> I am posting a query from a student who is in a philosophy PhD
> program at Princeton and is writing a dissertation on the acquisition
> of
> morality.
>
> He is interested in getting some suggestions on where to look
> for articles on how/when children develop a sense of morality and can
> distinguish between right and wrong from a linguistic perspective.
> I would appreciate any suggestions for articles or a direction he
> might
> pursue.
>
> Thank you,
>
> Dr. Andrea Feldman, Senior Instructor
> University of Colorado at Boulder
> 317 UCB, ENVD Bldg.
> Program for Writing and Rhetoric Boulder, CO 80309-0317
> 303-492-4396
> FAX 303-492-7877 feldman at spot.colorado.edu
> >
>   


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