The effect of accent exposure on children's sociolinguistic evaluation of peers.

Melissa Paquette-Smith,Helen Buckler,Jiyoun Choi,Elizabeth K. Johnson,Katherine S. White

doi:10.1037/dev0000659

Abstract

Language and accent strongly influence the formation of social groups. By five years of age, children already show strong social preferences for peers who speak their native language with a familiar accent (Kinzler, Shutts, DeJesus, & Spelke, 2009). However, little is known about the factors that modulate the strength and direction of children's accent-based group preferences. In three experiments, we examine the development of accent-based friendship preferences in children growing up in Toronto, one of the world's most linguistically and culturally diverse cities. We hypothesized that the speaker's type of accent and the amount of accent exposure children experienced in their everyday lives would modulate their preferences in a friend selection task. Despite literature suggesting that exposure leads to greater acceptance (Allport, 1954), we find no evidence that routine exposure to different accents leads to greater acceptance of unfamiliarly accented speakers. Children still showed strong preferences for peers who spoke with the locally dominant accent, despite growing up in a linguistically diverse community. However, children's preference for Canadian-accented in-group members was stronger when they were paired with non native (Korean-accented) speakers compared to when they were paired with regional (British-accented) speakers. We propose that children's ability to perceptually distinguish between accents may have contributed to this difference. Children showed stronger preferences for in-group members when the difference between accents was easier to perceive. Overall, our findings suggest that although the strength of accent-based social preferences can be modulated by the type of accent, these preferences still persist in the face of significant diversity in children's accent exposure. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Highlights

Infants direct their attention towards people who speak their native language with a familiar accent, a listening preference does not necessarily indicate a social preference
These accent-based group preferences are so robust that accent can even take precedence over racial cues to group membership
Why do American children prefer to be friends with other American-accented children over children who speak with a French accent? Is it because American children are less familiar with French accents? Or do they have greater difficulty understanding French-accented English? Or is it because the non-native-accented children are less fluent and native speakers are biased against this disfluency?

Summary

Introduction

Infants direct their attention towards people who speak their native language with a familiar accent, a listening preference does not necessarily indicate a social preference (see Haith, 1998 for a discussion). There has been work examining how exposure to multiple languages (i.e., growing up in a bilingual environment) might influence children’s language- and accent-based preferences (DeJesus, Hwang, Dautel, & Kinzler, 2017; Kinzler, Shutts, & Spelke, 2012; Souza et al, 2013) In these studies it was found that similar to monolingual children, children exposed to multiple languages show preferences for familiar over unfamiliar languages and for nativeaccented speakers over speakers who speak with non-native accents (DeJesus et al, 2017; Kinzler et al, 2012; Souza et al, 2013). These studies do not consider that there may be extensive variation in the amount of accented speech that bilingual children are exposed to, and that this may impact the strength and malleability of their group preferences

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