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Children often "overimitate," comprehensively copying others' actions despite manifest perceptual cues to their causal ineffectuality. The inflexibility of this behavior renders its adaptive significance difficult to apprehend. This study explored the boundaries of overimitation in 3- to 6-year-old children of three distinct cultures: Westernized, urban Australians (N = 64 in Experiment 1; N = 19 in Experiment 2) and remote communities of South African Bushmen (N = 64) and Australian Aborigines (N = 19). Children overimitated at high frequency in all communities and generalized what they had learned about techniques and object affordances from one object to another. Overimitation thus provides a powerful means of acquiring and flexibly deploying cultural knowledge. The potency of such social learning was also documented compared to opportunities for exploration and practice.

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This article presents a Conversation Analytic study of silences in talk recorded in remote Aboriginal communities, and compares the length, distribution and interactional management of such silences with what we know about them in Anglo-Australian and American talk. Ethnographic studies of Australian Aboriginal discourse have frequently claimed that Australian Aboriginal people are comfortable with long periods of silence. While our findings support this notion, the micro level of analysis we are able to apply to our data here allows for a more fine-grained understanding of what it means to tolerate longer silences in the context of Aboriginal conversation.

Young children typically demonstrate low rates of tool innovation. However, previous studies have limited children's performance by presenting tools with opaque affordances. In an attempt to scaffold children's understanding of what constitutes an appropriate tool within an innovation task we compared tools in which the focal affordance was visible to those in which it was opaque. To evaluate possible cultural specificity, data collection was undertaken in a Western urban population and a remote Indigenous community. As expected affordance visibility altered innovation rates: young children were more likely to innovate on a tool that had visible affordances than one with concealed affordances. Furthermore, innovation rates were higher than those reported in previous innovation studies. Cultural background did not affect children's rates of tool innovation. It is suggested that new methods for testing tool innovation in children must be developed in order to broaden our knowledge of young children's tool innovation capabilities.