Author: cvaughn

Dan Tudorica

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We take great pride in our notion of America as a meritocratic country. Our ideology says that if an individual has the skills and the drive to perform successful and meaningful work, they will be rewarded in proportion to their competency and motivation. For many immigrants, the notion that America justly distributes rewards is why they came here in the first place. This ideal, however, is not completely true to the immigrant experience: 31.4% of first-generation immigrants are underemployed, relative to 18.2% of second-generation immigrants (Slack). That is to say, even when education level and job readiness are held equal, some part of the immigrant experience prevents almost a third of immigrants from attaining the jobs and economic rewards that their skills entitle them to. There are a number of factors that are responsible for this. For instance, while immigrants often have very expansive and tight-knit social networks with other immigrants, these communities often become so tight-knit as to exclude economically productive ties with other immigrant groups or native-born people (Hagan). Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that education and training received abroad is universally less valued than preparations obtained domestically, even when immigrants come from developed nations: employers perceive barriers to applying “foreign-acquired” skills to domestic workplaces. This gap between native-born workers and foreign-born workers is durable across years spent in the workforce. Absent education in a domestic institution, foreign-educated workers are consistently left behind (Friedberg). What unites these two explanations is the degree to which they rely on communication and the impressions produced by immigrants.

And so, I am keenly interested in the degree to which accent might affect these factors: I can imagine that accent might cause immigrants to believe (perhaps rightfully so) that speech and interaction with native citizens activates stereotyping or perhaps even hostility, which could act to reinforce the tendency to form tight-knit immigrant communities and to seek jobs only within these social networks. Furthermore, the fact that years of workplace experience do not diminish the gap in pay between workers of similar education and training suggests that some factor other than “skill compatibility” is at work: it is not just that the training that immigrants received before moving to their new home is not perfectly compatible with the work expected of them, because years of workplace experience should act to rectify outstanding differences in a way that is not reflected by the data. It is also telling that education in the host country effectively reduces this discrepancy: perhaps in addition to “skill alignment,” immigrants successfully pick up cultural capital that allows them to more successfully navigate the economic landscape, which may, for instance, help reduce the perceived “foreignness” of the worker. These ideas, of course, interact with the simpler explanation that employers are simply prejudiced against people with foreign accents. Studies show that having a regional accent that differs from the employer’s negatively impacts evaluations of job suitability (Dianne), and that the presence of an accent empowers individuals who are identified as being prejudiced to leave a more negative evaluation of prospective employees (de Souza). Therefore, it seems important to investigate the relationship between these competing explanations: to what degree is the immigrant job search impacted by having an accent, and what factors modulate the degree to which having an accent impacts the impression you leave on employers?

I propose a series of experiments to test these hypotheses. I would design resumes imitating the profile of an immigrant educated in, for instance, engineering. I would have a person capable of adopting the accent of such an immigrant applicant phone in to a number of job openings requesting an interview, both with and without the accent, saying precisely the same words. The purpose of this experiment would be to “challenge” a native accent with foreign qualifications, in order to see if accent can overwhelm the well-documented application weakness of being educated in a foreign country. After this, I would perform another trial where I modify the call’s script and resume to contain mentions of items that indicate cultural assimilation in the host country: perhaps many years spent living in the country listed on the resume. Finally, I would include a trial where I do the same thing, but with items that indicate workplace assimilation instead: something like attending a professional conference in the host country. As a control, I would repeat this trial with resumes indicating education in a university in the country where the study takes place. The overall purpose of these experiments is to determine how these metrics of assimilation, either economic or cultural, modulate the ways in which accent impacts perceived suitability for upper middle class jobs.

At the end of the day, the correct interpretation probably lies somewhere between the material (difficulty hearing about new jobs, having slightly different skill sets) and cultural (employers being prejudiced against foreigners) explanations for why immigrants have a much harder time finding suitable employment than their peers. Determining where on this continuum the truth lies is important for coming up with strategies, policies, and mindsets that give immigrants a fair shake in their new homes. However, the degree of cultural/economic assimilation is just one variable that can modulate how harshly foreign accents are judged in the workplace. It is very likely that the impact of accent is modulated depending on the prestige and type of work that is being applied for–perhaps employers requiring advanced degrees are more likely to rely on prior accomplishments than gut feeling. It is also possible that employers fall back on prejudices when the amount of information they have is insufficient, so perhaps the detail included in the resume affects the degree to which prejudicial attitudes are activated. Regardless, it is important to start somewhere, and the existing literature suggests that assimilation into the host culture makes job acquisition more easy. Future work could build off of the findings of this study, and explore other factors that might impact the immigrant experience as far as language prejudice is concerned, using the methods drafted by this initial study.

 

Works Cited

Cukor-Avila, P. (2000). Regional accent discrimination in the hiring process: A language attitude study. Thesis, University of North Texas.

Friedberg, Rachel M. (2000). You Can’t Take it with You? Immigrant Assimilation and the Portability of Human Capital. Journal of Labor Economics. Volume 18, Number 2.

Hagan, Jacqueline M. (1998). Social Networks, Gender, and Immigrant Incorporation: Resources and Constraints.American Sociological Review. Volume 63, Number 1.

Luana Elayne Cunha de Souza et al (2016). The legitimizing role of accent on discrimination against immigrants. European Journal of Social Psychology. Volume 46, Issue 5.

Slack, Tim., Jensen, Leif (2007). Underemployment across immigrant generations. Social Science Research. Volume 36, Issue 4.

Jozef Standow

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When was the last time you heard someone speak in an “accent”? What did you think about that person? Did their accent tell you something about them? For many of us, the answer to that last question is “yes.” It’s no secret that no two people who speak a language speak it identically, but the difference between two people’s speech can range from quite similar to so different that one might as well be speaking in a different dialect. In our globalized and internet-penetrated world, we’ve grown used to hearing and interacting with people who speak our language in a markedly different way, which has led to the construction of stereotypes about people who speak in what we’d consider to be “accents.” Accent is in quotes here because it’s generally used to describe a collection of audible speech variables that is different from that of the speaker. This definition is somewhat misleading: Midwestern Americans may say Brits have a British accent, but those same Brits would likely say the Americans have an American accent. Hence, every version of a language can be considered an accent.

Knowing this linguistic reality doesn’t change the fact that many still consider “accented” speech as “different from mine,” a mindset which promotes stereotypes and develops from a young age. If we want to reduce voice-based discrimination, it helps to understand how children develop these discriminatory patterns, and to do that, we need to know when children begin to differentiate between accents and what social judgements they make on them. Some linguistics researchers have began to explore this developmental trend; Kinzler et al. and Creel in 2009 and 2016, respectively, found that five-year-old children would rather be friends with others their age who speak the same version of English as them, a factor that even outweighed skin color in importance to the predominantly white children studied. These studies concluded that this preference was likely due to the children’s preferences for familiarity, and Kinzler et al. continued to suggest that such accent preferences are prioritized because ancient humans differed much more in accent between groups than in skin color.

While we could accept these findings and agree that, at minimum, children must prefer people who sound familiar to them, these studies’ methodologies (Creel’s experiment is a slightly modified recreation of Kinzler et al.’s) have a poignant flaw: in each, researchers present children with two differently accented voice recordings side-by-side and ask them which speaker they’d rather be friends with. This type of test is known as a forced-choice test, and it leaves the children’s feelings toward the unselected speaker up to interpretation. Do they dislike the differently accented speakers? Do they dislike both but like the natively accented speaker slightly more? Is there something other than accent guiding their preferences? Are they indifferent? These questions are important because with the current data, we don’t know how prejudice and preference are weighed in these children’s friendship decisions. If someone were to design an educational intervention to, say, make children more willing to be friends with those who speak differently than them, the designer would not know whether to deconstruct preference of familiarity, prejudice toward unfamiliarity, or some mixture of both. A successful intervention would promote acceptance of “accented” speakers throughout society; we all have accents, and there’s nothing wrong with speaking one way or another, regardless of how familiar that speech is.

In 2010, linguists Whitely and Kite critiqued the commonly used “Preschool Racial Attitude Measure” (PRAM) test, a forced-choice racial bias test developed by John Williams and J. Kenneth Morland (1976) that has similar pitfalls to the forced-choice accent-preference test used by Kinzler et al. and Creel. In the PRAM, tested children look at two drawings identical in all features but skin color, one of a black-skinned boy and one of a white-skinned boy, and are either told to choose which one is  a “good boy” or choose which one is a “bad boy.” Whitely and Kite argue that even if children reliably associate one skin color with positive adjectives and the other with negative adjectives, there is not enough evidence to confirm those decisions are due to racial bias because arbitrary factors may be at play (i.e. the participant may say, “I chose that child because he has friendlier eyes than the other child).

Whitley and Kite proposed two solutions that could allow an evolution of the PRAM to more effectively assess racial attitudes without leaving the presence of racial bias up to assumption. One of these is to use a continuous measure of prejudice to assess such attitudes; the authors claim that questions like “Would you feel comfortable living next door to a black family?” rated on a multi-option scale from “No, definitely” to “Yes, definitely” would not force children to choose one skin color over the other and provide a clearer look at how they felt about different races.

The same logic applies to the forced-choice test used in Kinzler et al.’s 2009 study and Creel’s 2016 study. Instead of a design that leaves part of children’s language attitudes up to assumption, I suggest modifying Creel’s methodology (which itself was an evolution of Kinzler et al.’s) to use a continuous measurement of listener attitude for each voice heard. In Creel’s study, researchers showed participants pictures of two children’s faces on a computer screen, had them listen to a sentence of the same words in a different accent form each, and asked them which they would rather be friends with. In my variation, researchers would present participants with one picture and one voice (either in their native English accent or a foreign one) at a time and have them rate their friendship preference along a five-step scale of emojis (big smile, small smile, neutral face, small frown, big frown) before moving onto another picture with the other accented voice. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll refer to these emojis as numbers 1 through 5, with 1 being a big smile, 3 being a neutral face, and 5 being a big frown.

This modification uses one of Whitley and Kite’s suggested alternatives to forced-choice testing, allowing researchers to better understand the true nature of young children’s attitudes toward familiar and unfamiliar varieties of English. Results from this modified study could either affirm and refine previous findings, or reject and contest them. In the former scenario, a statistically significant number of participants would indicate that they prefer to be friends with children who sound similar over foreign-accented ones. This level of preference could range from a 1 for the local speaker and a 5 for the foreign one to a much more subtle difference, like a 1 for the local speaker and a 2 for the foreign one. Any result like this affirms existing research and refines it by revealing tangible differences in participants’ feelings toward both speakers. Results that reject existing research would show that participants mostly felt the same about each speaker or actually preferred the foreign-accented one; in either case, the new results would contest existing ones, which could be due to methodological flaws in the forced-choice method.

In either case, with more accurate language attitude data, educators could more effectively design educational interventions to decrease voice-based and other forms of discrimination. If such interventions are successful, we may see positive changes in inclusiveness and tolerance trends throughout society. Different doesn’t have to mean worse, and this research puts us one step closer to that reality.

 

Works cited (APA):

Creel, S. C. (2016). Accent detection and social cognition: evidence of protracted learning. Developmental Science, 21(2), 1-12. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/desc.12524

Kinzler, K. D., Shutts, K., Dejesus, J., & Spelke, E. S. (2009). Accent trumps race in guiding children’s social preferences. Social cognition, 27(4), 623–634. https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/abs/10.1521/soco.2009.27.4.623

Whitley, B. E., & Kite, M. E. (2010). Psychology of prejudice and discrimination. (pp. 285-287). Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.

Hannah Sebring

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Disney has captured the attention and hearts of people from all ages and backgrounds for nearly a century now, with some controversy about the messages sent along the way. Most of these criticisms circulate around the representation of gender roles, racial/cultural diversity, as well as other forms of representation. One area Disney has seemed to fail repeatedly yet is never chastised for is linguistic representation. Language and language attitudes play a large role in shaping how people–especially children–see the greater world and may sometimes be more important than other categories. In response to these criticisms, some linguistic studies have examined the racial representation of characters and their roles in Disney films, while connecting them to language ideals the general public may not be aware of. These studies found non human characters to be the most likely to have a foreign accent while females are the least likely to have any deviance from Standard American English (“Teaching”). What the women in these films do seem to practice, though, are gender-normal language behaviours that are often perceived as being docile, unsure, and unintelligent.

With this in mind, recent literature has explored movies like Frozen and found that despite the strong female lead duo, men still take up 59 percent of the total lines (Azmi 2016). Previous movies like Snow White or Sleeping Beauty were much more disproportional and portrayed the standard, docile, and soft spoken princesses. As the princesses have fought for more screen time representation, have the other messages they’re sending changed as well? Azmi looked at the independent nature of these lead characters, examining how often they were interrupted, followed male commands, gave commands themselves or used what are called empty adjectives (the gender-normal behaviour described above). Empty adjectives refer to hollow responses or mere space holders in conversation like, “that’s cool” or “adorable” (Hedenmalm). The expression of some female dominated speech patterns is inconsistent in the evolution of the princess movies, but “what all movies have in common, however, is female characters who are independent, capable and make sure to express their opinions (Hedenmalm).” Because these characters face adversity in the doubts of the abilities of women by those surrounding them, the princesses of more modern placed movies like Aladdin and Princess and the Frog expressed much more resistance to control and took on more independent language as such.

As these films continue to evolve with time and strive to portray strong female leads and story lines, the general public and linguists alike are curious to see to what degree they are actually succeeding. Moana is the most recent princess to be released, and was widely praised for her more athletic figure, cultural representation, and relative independence in her story line. It seems the linguistic representation has been noted as well, with Disney putting “together a group of experts, which they named The Oceanic Story Trust. The group included archeologists, anthropologists, tattoo masters, choreographers, weavers, fishermen, and sailors. They stayed in contact and ran ideas by them throughout the process to make sure they stayed as true as possible to the spirit and roots of Pacific Islanders (Bellessa).” These acknowledgements also included the idea that, “Creating a character isn’t just about the words. Because the story of Moana is inspired by the oral histories of the Oceania people, it was important for Disney to find someone to voice Moana who also had Oceania roots (Bellessa).” It seems Disney has been taking note of the wishes of their audiences and finding ways to be representative in their films. With this in mind, my paper will explore whether modern princesses like Moana will not exhibit the same gender-normative linguistic features of her predecessors (empty adjectives, being interrupted, obeying commands, etc.). This will provide insights into whether smaller children still forming categories surrounding gender, race, etc. are able to see these princesses as positive role models in their lives and connect to the idea of strong, female leaders.

 

Works Cited

Azmi, N.J. “Gender and Speech in a Disney Princess Movie.” International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature, vol. 5, no. 6, 2016, doi:10.7575 /aiac.ijalel.v.5n.6p.235.

Bellessa, Summer. “5 Reasons Why Moana Is the Disney Role Model We’ve All Been Waiting For.” Babble, Disney, 26 Sept. 2016 www.babble.com/entertainment/

moana-disney-role-weve-all-been-waiting-for/.

Hedenmalm, Li. “Language and Gender in Disney.” Luleå University of Technology.

“Teaching Children How to Discriminate.” English with an Accent: Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the United States, by Rosina Lippi-Green, Routledge, 2012, pp. 101–129.

Ella Wood

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Along the same vein of recognizing the race of a speaker through their speech, I am interested in researching a listener’s ability to determine a speaker’s sexual orientation through speech. More specifically, is male homosexual speech patterns detectable enough that children may hold implicit bias against a “gay” voice before they have even formed a category for sexuality? To determine this, we have to look that the implications of what “gay” speech is and how homosexuality in based in today’s society.

First, what is “gay” speech? In comparison to research discovering the features of AAVE, there actually has not been much research regarding linguistic features and their connection to particular sexualities. The little research that exist more often addresses specifically only male homosexuality, with a lack of literature on female sexuality, which is why I will be focussing solely on bias against the former group. With homosexual men here is a certain sound that has been confirmed by a study called the “gay lisp”. This misarticulated /s/ sound has been shown to be strongly associated with male homosexuality, which may be caused by the prevalence of this sound in popular media (Mack 2012). Another study has shown that listener’s were better able to judge male sexual orientation when the /s/ sound was combined with certain vowel sounds (Tracy 2015), showing it’s interconnected nature with other factors in male homosexual speech. Lastly I want to note that the “gay lisp” does not refer to all gay men, yet will still be effective in testing implicit bias. Another aspect of speech that I would like to address is femininity in male homosexual speech related to this “gay lisp”. Two studies show how femininity is associated: Munson (2007) found that adult homosexual men speech was perceived as more feminine than their heterosexual counterparts, and Munson (2015) found that children ages 4-13 with “gay lisp” were judged as sounding more girl-like. Both of these studies show how femininity and the “gay lisp” are markers of sexual deviance in young boys, and that this linguistic marker is evident to children and should be researched further. Although there these two features are clearly associated with male homosexuality, my research will include other general features along with these two characteristics so that my experiment is most accurate to implicit bias against this voice. That said, further research should be done to understand the full scope of gay linguistic features.

Regarding the categorization of sexuality, research area is particularly sparse, and so researching bias and categorization of sexuality will also depend on past research that connects sexuality with gender socialization of men. There are many studies that connect masculinity with the rejection of femininity and gay speech. For example, Cameron (1997) found that gender identity can influence young men to avoid sounding gay and feminine to adhere to strict masculinity rules expected by society. This can also be seen with Fasoli et al (2018) that found that heterosexual men viewed their speech as typical of their gender, as a opposed to homosexual men who viewed theirs as atypical. In addition, heterosexual men were most likely to communicate their sexuality through their speech, showing that there was a desire to affirm their masculinity and typical gender identity. These examples show that there is a correlation between gender and sexuality, where feminized speech is seen as not masculine or typical of male speech, and is thus avoided and stigmatized in male speech. This gender socialization with masculinity and heterosexuality is an interesting concept, and can help reduce when this categorization occurs. There is little research on the categorization of sexuality in children, however there is research on an important concept that has been identified is the connection gender and sexuality in the “Heterosexual market”, as coined by Penelope Eckert. This concept refers to the idea that gender segregation begins in preadolescence, where kids being to form gender ideals and participate in heterosexual activities. Due to the prevalent association with heterosexuality and privilege, this is an important stage because this “market” in which children become straight commodities is not for romantic purposes but acquiring status through heterosexual pairings. This is important because it shows the stage in life where children begin to acknowledge heterosexuality as the norm. This stage could possibly be when “gay” speech is consciously categorized, and possibly when young boys begin can explicitly understand bias against homosexuality. Therefore it is likely that an age group 3-6 would not have made a category for sexual identity yet. However since the concept of gender is learned much earlier than that, these children may still hold an implicit bias related to the femininity of the gay male voice. Due to this one could argue that these results would thus show children’s implicit bias against male femininity and not sexual orientation, yet I would argue that these two concepts are interconnected, where male homosexuality is feared because is related to deviating from stereotypical male gender roles.

There is very little research regarding children’s bias against male homosexuality before their categorization of sexuality. However it is extremely important that research is done regarding this, especially when language is used as a stimuli. Like in research of AAVE, language can help children socially evaluate the speaker, and it is equally possible that through lack of personal experience or through media that children will socially evaluate a voice that is in general negatively represented. Hopefully with this study there will be more information on if bias is formed before categorization, and will direct further research on gay linguistic features, linguistic bias against gay voices, and when specifically categorization of sexuality begins to form.

Works Cited:

Cameron, Deborah (1997). Performing gender identity: Young men’s talk and the construction of heterosexual masculinity. Language and masculinity.Language and Masculinity, 47–64. Oxford: Blackwell.

Eckert, Penelope (2010). Language and power in the heterosexual market.Stanford University.

Erik Tracy et al (2015). Judgments of self-identifies gay and heterosexual male speakers: Which phonemes are most salient in determining sexual orientation?.  Journal of Phonetics, Volume 52.

Fabio Fasoli et al (2018). Who wants to sound straight? Sexual majority and minority stereotypes, beliefs and desires about auditory gaydar. Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 130.

Mack, Sara and Benjamin Munson (2012). The influence of /s/ quality on ratings of men’s sexual orientation: Explicit and implicit measures of the “gay lisp” stereotype. Journal of Phonetics, Volume 40, Issue 1.

Munson, Benjamin (2007). The acoustic correlates of perceived masculinity, perceived femininity, and perceived sexual orientation. Sage Journals.

Munson, Benjamin (2015). Variation in /s/ and the perceived gender typicality of children’s speech. University of Minnesota.

Isabel Crabtree

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How does language exposure influence how children evaluate others?

Most of the children in the world outside the U.S. grow up around more than one language, and children within the U.S. are growing up in increasingly multilingual environments themselves. More than 65 million U.S. residents speak a language other than English at home, and more than 40 million people in the U.S. speak Spanish alone (see census.gov). Bilingual speakers are thus an increasingly relevant group within the U.S., particularly English/Spanish bilinguals.

Will this increase in language diversity affect how children learn to think about others?

Multiple studies have established that language is an important part of how people make social evaluations of others. Adults make inferences about intelligence, personality, and even attractiveness based solely on the way a person speaks, and children likewise make social judgements based on language from the time they’re in elementary school (Preston 2013, Kinzler et al 2007). Studies of English-speaking children have shown that kids prefer to be friends with people who speak English with a native accent over people who speak a foreign language, or even people who speak English with a foreign accent (Kinzler et al 2007, Kizler et al 2009). Children as young as 3 may recognize and prefer people who speak their own language, and as kids grow up their preference for people who have a native accent continues to strengthen (Creel 2016). The evidence, then, certainly suggests that language is a strong factor in how children think about and evaluate other people. All of the studies mentioned above, however, examine only monolingual English-speaking children. What about kids who grow up speaking more than just English? If language is a relevant category for deciding how to feel about others, does speaking more than one language influence a child’s social evaluations of other people?

The literature on the social preferences of bilingual children is not nearly as expansive as the research on monolingual English speakers, but there are nonetheless multiple studies that have investigated the relationship between language exposure and social attitudes. Kinzler et al (2012), for example, tested the language-based social judgements of children in South Africa, which is a highly multilingual nation where children grow up exposed to Xhosa, English, and likely several other languages besides, and often grow up speaking several of these languages fluently. The study found that Xhosa-speaking children with exposure to Xhosa, English, and Senestho preferred people who spoke their native language, Xhosa, over a person who spoke French, a foreign language to which they had little exposure. In this case, then, exposure to multiple languages did not seem to make children more flexible in their language-based social preferences— in other words, their experience with multiple languages did not necessarily make them more open to people with foreign accents. However, this study did not address bilingualism directly, only exposure. Several U.S. studies that have addressed bilingualism directly, though, found similar results: both monolingual and bilingual children in the U.S. seem to prefer to be friends with people who speak one of their native languages over someone who speaks a foreign language or has a foreign accent (Souza et al 2013, DeJesus et al 2017). However, several other studies complicate this picture: when children are asked to assign traits to people, rather than simply saying who they’d prefer to be friends with, monolingual and bilingual children begin to differ. Anisfeld and Lambert (1964 (Links to an external site.)) and Byers-Heinlein et al (2016) found that bilingual children are less likely to use language to attribute personality traits to people, while Byers-Heinlein and Garcia (2014) found that bilingual children are more likely to see a person’s traits as learned rather than innate (reduced social essentialism). This raises fascinating questions about how— and to what extent—  a child’s language environment influences how she thinks about other people.

Evidence thus suggests that both monolingual and bilingual children tend to prefer people who have familiar accents, but that they begin to differ when it comes to making more complex language-based social judgements, like inferring personality traits based on how a person speaks. I am interested in comparing the social evaluations of monolingual English-speaking children and bilingual English/Spanish-speaking children when they are presented with people who speak a foreign language, people who speak one of their native languages with a foreign accent, and people who speak a different dialect of their native language. Will bilingual children assign traits differently than monolingual children? Does growing up speaking two languages influence the way children evaluate speakers of different language varieties?

English/Spanish bilingualism and its relation to the formation of language attitudes in children is an increasingly relevant area of study for an understanding of language attitudes in the U.S. If learning English and Spanish during childhood does appear to decrease social essentialism or increase social flexibility, language exposure could even be investigated as a tool to be used in education and at home to foster tolerance and reduce prejudice in children.

 

Works cited

Anisfeld, E., & Lambert, W. E. (1964). Evaluational reactions of bilingual and monolingual children to spoken languages. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 69(1), 89-97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0040913 (Links to an external site.)

Byers‐Heinlein, K. and Garcia, B. (2015), Bilingualism changes children’s beliefs about what is innate. Dev Sci, 18: 344-350. doi:10.1111/desc.12248Links to an external site.

Byers‐Heinlein, K. , Behrend, D. A., Said, L. M., Girgis, H. and Poulin‐Dubois, D. (2017), Monolingual and bilingual children’s social preferences for monolingual and bilingual speakers. Dev Sci, 20: e12392. doi:10.1111/desc.12392Links to an external site.

Creel, SC. Accent detection and social cognition: evidence of protracted learning. Dev Sci. 2018; 21:e12524. https://doi-org.libproxy.uoregon.edu/10.1111/desc.12524Links to an external site.

DeJesus J.M., Hwang H.G., Dautel J.B., Kinzler K.D. (2017).  Bilingual children’s social preferences hinge on accent. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 164 , pp. 178-191

Kinzler, K. D., Shutts, K., Dejesus, J., & Spelke, E. S. (2009). Accent trumps race in guiding children’s social preferences. Social cognition, 27(4), 623–634. doi:10.1521/soco.2009.27.4.623.

Kinzler, K. D., Shutts, K., & Spelke, E. S. (2012). Language-based social preferences among children in South Africa. Language learning and development : the official journal of the Society for Language Development, 8(3), 215–232. doi:10.1080/15475441.2011.583611

Souza, A. L., Byers-Heinlein, K., & Poulin-Dubois, D. (2013). Bilingual and monolingual children prefer native-accented speakers. Frontiers in psychology, 4, 953. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00953