EVALUATIONAL REACTIONS OF BILINGUAL AND MONOLINGUAL CHILDREN TO SPOKEN LANGUAGES.

Abstract

Monolingual and bilingual French-Canadian children listened to tape recordings of children's voices, some in English, some in French, and rated each speaker's personality on IS traits. Differences between the ratings assigned French and English voices by the subgroups were interpreted as indicative of differences in stereotyped reactions to French and English Canadians. Two recent studies (Anisfeld, Bogo, & Lambert, 1962; Lambert, Hodgson, Gardner, & Fillenbaum, 1960) employed a research technique that appears capable of revealing the stereotyped characteristics which one linguistic-cultural group attributes to another. This is achieved by eliciting evaluational reactions to speakers using a language that characterizes members of a particular cultural group. The assumption underlying the use of this technique is that a listener's attitude toward members of a particular group should generalize to the language they use and consequently his evaluational reactions to the spoken language should be similar to his reactions when actually in contact with a group member. Because a particular language is common to all members of a cultural group, reactions to the language itself would be expected to reflect generalized stereotypes held about the group. In the Lambert et al. study, two groups of adults, one English Canadian and the other French Canadian, were asked to rate various personality characteristics of five bilingual speakers, reading the same passage once in English and once in French. The subjects were led to believe that they were rating 10 different personalities. The results showed that both English- and French-Canadian groups rated the speakers in their English guise much more favorably than in their French guise. It was argued that English Canadians viewed their own group as superior to the French group and that the French Canadians seemed to have accepted the inferior position assigned to them by the 1 This research was supported by a subvention from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to W. E. Lambert. majority culture around them, that is, they rated the French-Canadian guises as inferior to the English on a large number of characteristics, except for kindness, which they attributed to their own language-group guise. From this study, it appeared that this technique was useful in revealing stereotypes and evaluations of one's own group in comparison to others. In the Anisfeld et al. study, Jewish and gentile college students rated the personalities underlying eight voices. Actually, there were only four speakers, each speaking once in flawless English and once in English with a distinctive, although not exaggerated, Jewish accent. The results indicated that the accented guises were comparatively devaluated on three traits (height, good looks, and leadership) by both gentile and Jewish subjects. The gentiles did not consider the accented guise as more favorable than the pure English on any trait, whereas the Jewish subjects did on three traits (sense of humor, entertainingness, and kindness). In this study, the Jewish subjects, also members of a minority group, did not completely accept the majority-group stereotype about them, as the French Canadians generally did, that is, they actually upgraded those using the Jewish accent on several traits. The purposes of the present study were: to use the technique to reveal children's stereotypes, to compare the evaluational reactions of 10-year-old French-Canadian children with those of adult French Canadians, and to determine if there are any differences between monolingual and bilingual FrenchCanadian children (French-English bilinguals) in the stereotypes they hold about Englishand French-Canadian youngsters,