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.12248
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.12392
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.12524
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