What young children think about the relationship between language variation and social difference

Abstract

Previous work suggests that preschoolers understand that members of some social groups (e.g., based on occupation or gender) speak in distinct ways, but do not understand that members of other social groups (e.g., based on race, culture, or nationality) speak different languages. In these four studies we explored preschool children's inferences about language and social group membership. In Study 1 we found that preschoolers believed that minority race individuals, people wearing unfamiliar clothing, or people living in unfamiliar dwellings were more likely to speak an unfamiliar foreign language than to speak English. Studies 2A and 2B showed that children do not map social group differences to language for all social categories. Specifically, children were more likely to attribute language differences to racial rather than age differences and were more likely to map differences in music preference onto age than racial differences. Results of Study 3 showed children's inferences about language and social group differences were not derived from differences in intelligibility. Study 4 provides insight into why children readily make these language to social kind mappings by identifying a common property that both broad social kinds and distinct languages are thought to share. Together these studies provide evidence that even preschoolers may be coordinating knowledge across content domains in a coherent and meaningful way that underwrites the projection of existing knowledge to unknown instances.