Katherine D Kinzler

Monolingual English-speaking children in the United States express social preferences for speakers of their native language with a native accent. Here we explore the nature of children's language-based social preferences through research with children in South Africa, a multilingual nation. Like children in the United States, Xhosa South African children preferred speakers of their first language (Xhosa) to speakers of a foreign language (French). Thus, social preferences based on ...

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 current experiments tested whether 5- to 7-year-olds in two bilingual contexts in the United States demonstrate social preferences among the languages and accents ...

Across four studies, we directly compared children's essentialist reasoning about the stability of race and language throughout an individual's lifespan. Monolingual English-speaking children were presented with a series of images of children who were either White or Black; each face was paired with a voice clip in either English or French. Participants were asked which of two adults each target child would grow up to be - one who was a 'match' to the target child in race but not ...

Whether emotion is a source of moral judgments remains controversial. This study combined neurophysiological measures, including functional magnetic resonance imaging, eye-tracking, and pupillary response with behavioral measures assessing affective and moral judgments across age. One hundred and twenty-six participants aged between 4 and 37 years viewed scenarios depicting intentional versus accidental actions that caused harm/damage to people and objects. Morally, salient scenarios ...

Do infants develop meaningful social preferences among novel individuals based on their social group membership? If so, do these social preferences depend on familiarity on any dimension, or on a more specific focus on particular kinds of categorical information? The present experiments use methods that have previously demonstrated infants' social preferences based on language and accent, and test for infants' and young children's social preferences based on race. In Experiment 1, ...

Across two experiments, preschool-aged children demonstrated selective learning of non-linguistic information from native-accented rather than foreign-accented speakers. In Experiment 1, children saw videos of a native- and a foreign-accented speaker of English who each spoke for 10 seconds, and then silently demonstrated different functions with novel objects. Children selectively endorsed the silent object function provided by the native-accented speaker. In Experiment 2, children ...

How does social information affect the perception of taste early in life? Does mere knowledge of other people's food preferences impact children's own experience when eating? In Experiment 1, 5- and 6-year-old children consumed more of a food described as popular with other children than a food that was described as unpopular with other children, even though the two foods were identical. In Experiment 2, children ate more of a food described as popular with children than a food described ...

Minority-race children in North America and Europe often show less own-race favoritism than children of the majority (White) race, but the reasons for this asymmetry are unresolved. The present research tested South African children in order to probe the influences of group size, familiarity, and social status on children's race-based social preferences. We assessed South African children's preferences for members of their country's majority race (Blacks) compared to members of other ...

Selecting appropriate foods is a complex and evolutionarily ancient problem, yet past studies have revealed little evidence of adaptations present in infancy that support sophisticated reasoning about perceptual properties of food. We propose that humans have an early-emerging system for reasoning about the social nature of food selection. Specifically, infants' reasoning about food choice is tied to their thinking about agents' intentions and social relationships. Whereas infants do not ...

Past research provides evidence that children use at least 2 potentially competing strategies when choosing informants: they attend to informants' past accuracy and to their social identity (e.g., their status as native- vs. foreign-accented speakers). We explore how children reconcile these 2 strategies when they are put in conflict and whether children's response changes across development. In Experiment 1 (N = 61), 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children watched a native- and a ...

A series of experiments investigated the effect of speakers' language, accent, and race on children's social preferences. When presented with photographs and voice recordings of novel children, 5-year-old children chose to be friends with native speakers of their native language rather than foreign-language or foreign-accented speakers. These preferences were not exclusively due to the intelligibility of the speech, as children found the accented speech to be comprehensible, and did not ...

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 (Kinzler, Dupoux, & Spelke, 2007), 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 ...

What leads humans to divide the social world into groups, preferring their own group and disfavoring others? Experiments with infants and young children suggest these tendencies are based on predispositions that emerge early in life and depend, in part, on natural language. Young infants prefer to look at a person who previously spoke their native language. Older infants preferentially accept toys from native-language speakers, and preschool children preferentially select native-language ...

Adults show better memory for ambiguous faces of their own race than for ambiguous faces of another race, even when the faces are identical and differentiated only by extraneous cues to racial category. We investigated whether similar context effects operate early in development. Young children raised in predominantly White environments were presented with computer-generated White-Black morphed faces, each paired with either the White or the Black face that contributed to its ...

Three experiments investigated 5- to 6-year-old monolingual English-speaking American children's sociolinguistic evaluations of others based on their accent (native, foreign) and social actions (nice, mean, neutral). In Experiment 1, children expressed social preferences for native-accented English speakers over foreign-accented speakers, and they judged the native-accented speakers to be "American." In Experiments 2 and 3, the accented speakers were depicted as being nicer than the ...