Who can speak that language? Eleven‐month‐old infants have language‐dependent expectations regarding speaker ethnicity

Abstract

Research demonstrates that young infants attend to the indexical characteristics of speakers, including age, gender, and ethnicity, and that the relationship between language and ethnicity is intuitive among older children. However, little research has examined whether infants, within the first year, are sensitive to the co‐occurrences of ethnicity and language. In this paper, we demonstrate that by 11 months of age, infants hold language‐dependent expectations regarding speaker ethnicity. Specifically, 11‐month‐old English‐learning Caucasian infants looked more to Asian versus Caucasian faces when hearing Cantonese versus English (Studies 1 and 3), but did not look more to Asian versus Caucasian faces when paired with Spanish (Study 2), making it unlikely that they held a general expectation that unfamiliar languages pair with unfamiliar faces. Moreover, infants who had regular exposure to one or more significant non‐Caucasian individuals showed this pattern more strongly (Study 3). Given that infants tested were raised in a multilingual metropolitan area—which includes a Caucasian population speaking many languages, but seldom Cantonese, as well as a sizeable Asian population speaking both Cantonese and English—these results are most parsimoniously explained by infants having learned specific language–ethnicity associations based on those individuals they encountered in their environment.

Putting Mutual Exclusivity in Context: Speaker Race Influences Monolingual and Bilingual Infants’ Word‐Learning Assumptions

“…Toddlers in this study had very little exposure to black individuals, but overall had some exposure to other racial backgrounds. In the context of a race for which they had a great deal of experience, infants had a strong linguistic expectation for this speaker, and mutual exclusivity was invoked (consistent with May et al, 2019; block 1 of Weatherhead & White, 2018). This result is consistent with monolinguals and bilinguals' prior experiences with familiar-race speakers, in that the label "zabe" was inconsistent with their known category labels for dog and cat.…”

“…For example, 6‐month‐olds were reported to match unfamiliar‐race faces with non‐native languages (Uttley et al., 2013), thereby demonstrating understanding of familiar‐race and unfamiliar‐race speakers as separate groups, and different beliefs about the languages these groups speak. By 11 months, infants in a community with many Chinese and English speakers had learned the relation between race and language, as illustrated by longer looking to East Asian faces when presented with a Chinese language than when presented with English, but comparable looking to East Asian and White faces when presented with an unfamiliar language (Spanish; May, Baron, & Werker, 2019). By 16 months, a speaker’s race influences recognition of familiar and unfamiliar pronunciations (e.g., “dog” vs. “dag”) of familiar words (Weatherhead & White, 2018).…”

Adaptation to Social-Linguistic Associations in Audio-Visual Speech

“…This lack of an effect at the population-level suggests that listeners are prepared for an Asian individual to speak the local accent, an expectation that is well-suited to the multi-ethnic landscape of their speech community. These results are in line with infants' developing expectations about the local native accent within this particular speech community [23], in addition to listeners' flexibility with "standard" German accents in the German-speaking context [24].…”

Keeping track of language: Can monolingual and bilingual infants associate a speaker with the language they speak?

“…There is also evidence that infants take visual cues about a person into account when reasoning about what language an unfamiliar talker might use. At least by 11 months, monolingual English-exposed infants associated faces of East Asian women with hearing Cantonese (May et al, 2019), indicating that they use the specific language spoken as a cue to a person's identity in some cases. Further studies also show that monolingual infants take the speaker's race into account in language processing tasks (Singh et al, 2020;Weatherhead et al, 2021).…”