Language provides rich social information about its speakers. For instance, adults and children make inferences about a speaker's social identity, geographic origins, and group membership based on her language and accent. Although infants prefer speakers of familiar languages, little is known about the developmental origins of humans’ sensitivity to language as marker of social identity. We investigated whether 9-month-olds use the language a person speaks as an indicator of that person's likely social relationships. Infants were familiarized with videos of two (...) people who spoke the same or different languages, and then viewed test videos of those two individuals affiliating or disengaging. Results suggest that infants expected two people who spoke the same language to be more likely to affiliate than two people who spoke different languages. Thus, infants view language as a meaningful social marker and use language to make inferences about third-party social relationships. (shrink)

In three experiments, two hundred and ninety‐seven 4‐ to 6‐year‐olds were asked to describe objects to a listener, and their answers were coded for the presence of general and specific facts. In Experiments 1 and 2, the listener's knowledge of the kinds of objects was manipulated. This affected references to specific facts at all ages, but only affected references to general facts in children aged 5 and older. In Experiment 3, children's goal in communicating was either pedagogical or not. Pedagogy (...) influenced references to general information from age 4, but not references to specific information. These findings are informative about how children vary general and specific information in conversation, and suggest that listeners' knowledge and children's pedagogical goals influenced children's responses via different mechanisms. 2018 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Three experiments examined 4‐ to 6‐year‐olds' use of potential cues to geographic background. In Experiment 1, 4‐ to 5‐year‐olds used a speaker's foreign accent to infer that they currently live far away, but 6‐year‐olds did not. In Experiment 2, children at all ages used accent to infer where a speaker was born. In both experiments, race played some role in children's geographic inferences. Finally, in Experiment 3, 6‐year‐olds used language to infer both where a speaker was born and where they (...) currently live. These findings reveal critical differences across development in the ways that speaker characteristics are used as inferential cues to a speaker's geographic location and history. 2017 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)