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Two experiments (total N = 195) examined third‐party inferences about friendship and shared preferences from reported dyadic information. Four‐year‐olds (N = 48) inferred friendship between individuals based on reports of prosocial behavior, and similarity, but not based on arbitrary links. Children privileged prosocial behavior over similarity when asked to adjudicate between the two. Adults (N = 120) were tested online and showed the same overall pattern of inferences. Furthermore, 4‐year‐olds (N = 27) expected individuals who had engaged in prosocial behavior to be playmates as well as friends, and to share preferences for novel games, but not novel foods. These findings shed crucial light on preschoolers' third‐party friendship inferences, and add to our knowledge of their concept of friendship.

Friendship is a fundamental part of being human. Understanding which cues indicate friendship and what friendship entails is critical for navigating the social world. We survey research on 3‐ to 6‐year‐old children’s friendship concepts, discussing both classic work from the 1970s and 1980s using interview methods, as well as current work using simpler experimental tasks. We focus on three core features of young children’s friendship concepts: (1) proximity, (2) prosocial interactions, and (3) similarity. For each, we discuss how recent findings extend and expand classic foundations. Importantly, we highlight that children’s knowledge develops earlier and is deeper than initially hypothesized, and how children’s abilities are supported by early social inferences in infancy. We examine the implications of young children’s friendship concepts and note exciting new avenues for future research.

Friendship is a fundamental part of being human. Understanding which cues indicate friendship and what friendship entails is critical for navigating the social world. We survey research on three- to six-year-old children’s friendship concepts, discussing both classic work from the 1970s and 1980s using interview methods, as well as current work using simpler experimental tasks. We focus on three core features of young children’s friendship concepts: 1) proximity, 2) prosocial interactions, and 3) similarity. For each, we discuss how recent findings extend and expand classic foundations. Importantly, we highlight that children’s knowledge develops earlier and is deeper than initially hypothesized, and how children’s abilities are supported by early social inferences in infancy. We examine the implications of young children’s friendship concepts and note exciting new avenues for future research.

Two studies explored young children's understanding of the role of shared language in communication by investigating how monolingual English-speaking children interact with an English speaker, a Spanish speaker, and a bilingual experimenter who spoke both English and Spanish. When the bilingual experimenter spoke in Spanish or English to request objects, four-year-old children, but not three-year-olds, used her language choice to determine whom she addressed (e.g. requests in Spanish were directed to the Spanish speaker). Importantly, children used this cue -language choice -only in a communicative context. The findings suggest that by four years, monolingual children recognize that speaking the same language enables successful communication, even when that language is unfamiliar to them. Three-year-old children's failure to make this distinction suggests that this capacity likely undergoes significant development in early childhood, although other capacities might also be at play.

It often seems easier to trust information from friends than strangers. Do preschoolers and adults expect such bias towards friends? Presented with a main character, her best friend, and a stranger, participants judged who was worthy of trust from the main character’s perspective (third-person) as well as their own (first-person). Adults (n = 128, 55 female) expected the main character to trust her friend even if she had been previously inaccurate, while basing their own judgments on accuracy. In contrast, four- and five-year-olds (n = 128, 62 female) thought that the main character would be like themselves and care only about accuracy. Thus, while adults incorporate both friendship and accuracy into trust judgments, preschoolers fail to see that friendship matters.

Five experiments explored the apparent discontinuity between infants’ success at inferring affiliation from observed imitation (Powell & Spelke, 2017), and four-year-olds’ failure on the same inference (Over & Carpenter, 2015). Experiment 1 tested whether children younger than age 4 (i.e., 3-year-olds) have an explicit, verbalizable, concept of imitation. We showed children three characters performing different bodymovements. The central character (copier) consistently imitated another character (the model), but not the third one (non-model). Three-year-olds could answer who the copierwas “copying,” thus demonstrating a lexicalized concept of imitation (Exp. 1). Adults spontaneously inferred that the copier’s affiliation lies with the model over the non-modeland that she will continue to copy the same model in the future (Exp. 2), but preschoolers’ success at these two inferences was extremely limited, just barely abovechance, and showed no improvement from ages three to five (Exp. 3). Nonetheless, preschoolers succeeded at making correct inferences when we primed the concept ofimitation either non-lexically by drawing attention to the similarity between the copier’s and model’s actions (Exp. 4), or both lexically and non-lexically in the context of separate characters uninvolved in the test questions (Exp. 5). Taken together, the findings provide evidence of continuity between the representations of imitation from infancy through the preschool years to adulthood, but in the context of the present experiments, young preschool children do not always spontaneously encode the central character's preferential imitation of one model over another.

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