Bilingual children’s social preferences hinge on accent

Abstract

Past research finds that monolingual and bilingual children prefer native speakers to individuals who speak in unfamiliar foreign languages or accents. Do children in bilingual contexts socially distinguish among familiar languages and accents and, if so, how do their social preferences based on language and accent compare? The present studies tested whether 5- to 7- year-old children in two bilingual contexts in the United States demonstrate social preferences among the languages and accents that are present in their social environments. We compared children’s preferences based on language (i.e., English versus their other native language) and their preferences based on accent (i.e., English with a native accent versus English with a non-native, yet familiar, accent). In Experiment 1, children attending a French immersion school demonstrated no preference between English and French speakers, but preferred American-accented English to French-accented English. In Experiment 2, bilingual Korean-American children demonstrated no preference between English and Korean speakers, but preferred American-accented English to Korean-accented English. Across studies, bilingual children’s preferences based on accent (i.e., American-accented English over French- or Korean-accented English) was not related to their own language dominance. These results suggest that children from diverse linguistic backgrounds demonstrate social preferences for native-accented speakers. Implications for understanding the potential relation between social reasoning and language acquisition are discussed.

Developmental sociolinguistics: Children's acquisition of language variation

“…At this point, accent‐based friendship preferences are so strong that they outweigh race preferences (Kinzler, Shutts, DeJesus, & Spelke, ; see Rakic, Steffens, & Mummendey, , for related findings with adults). Young children's preference for friends who “talk like me” also holds for bilingual children (even when the non‐native accent is familiar; DeJesus, Hwang, Dautel, & Kinzler, ), as well as when children have to choose between a speaker of their own regional variety and another regional variety of the same native language, such as Canadian and British English (Paquette‐Smith, Buckler, White, Choi, & Johnson, ). From early on, children seem to weight a speaker's proficiency in the native language phonology over their semantic or syntactic proficiency when forming language‐based social preferences (Hwang & Markson, ).…”

Neural representation of linguistic feature hierarchy reflects second-language proficiency

“…Instructed second-language (L2) learning is a time-consuming and challenging process. Adult learners rarely attain native-like L2 proficiency and instead carry-over features of their native languages to their L2 [1][2][3] , which can have a major impact on their social lives [4][5][6] . Listening to L2 speech elicits stronger neural activations in shared linguistic areas 7,8 and engages cortical areas that are not active when listening to the native language 9 .…”

Status-based preference of varieties in bidialectal kindergarteners: an experimental study

“…Furthermore, 5-7-year-old American children attending a French immersion school demonstrated no preference between English and French speakers, and similarly, their bilingual Korean-American peers did not favor one of their languages over the other. However, both groups showed preference for American-accented English as opposed to French-accented English in the former group of participants, and to Korean-accented English in the latter one (DeJesus et al 2017).…”

“…Despite the fact that most children grow up in linguistically diverse environments, there are few studies on the development of linguistic preferences in bilingual children (Anisfeld & Lambert 1964), particularly in children before/around school admission (DeJesus et al 2017). Even fewer publications have targeted bilingual/bidialectal young children who live in a linguistic environment where there is neither an "official language"/"lingua franca"-"local language" relation in bilingualism (Day 1980;Kinzler, Shutts & Spelke 2012), nor diglossia in bidialectism (Häcki Buhofer et al 1994), but a high level of interference (continuum) between two or more languages/varieties in many speech domains (Kaiser & Kasberger, forthcoming).…”