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. 2007 Jul 24;104(30):12577-80.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.0705345104. Epub 2007 Jul 17.

The native language of social cognition

Katherine D Kinzler  1 , Emmanuel Dupoux, Elizabeth S Spelke
Affiliations

The native language of social cognition

Katherine D Kinzler et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. .

Abstract

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 speakers as friends. Variations in accent are sufficient to evoke these social preferences, which are observed in infants before they produce or comprehend speech and are exhibited by children even when they comprehend the foreign-accented speech. Early-developing preferences for native-language speakers may serve as a foundation for later-developing preferences and conflicts among social groups.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Example displays for the social preference experiments. (a) Five- to 6-month-old infant looking time procedure. (b) Ten-month-old infant toy choice procedure. (c) Five-year-old child friendship choice procedure. In all experiments, the order and positions of native and nonnative speakers and the pairings of speech conditions with faces were counterbalanced.
Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.
Looking preferences by 5- to 6-month-old infants for adult speakers of their native language. Infants looked longer at silent human adults who previously spoke in the infants' native language played naturally rather than in reverse (a), in the infants' native language rather than a foreign language (c), or in the infants' native language with a native accent rather than a foreign accent (d). (b) Infants showed equal looking at silent moving geometric forms previously paired with the forward- vs. reverse-speech streams.
Fig. 3.
Fig. 3.
Social preferences by 10-month-old infants and 5-year-old children for adult speakers of their native language. (a) French and American infants preferentially selected a toy offered by a person who previously spoke in their native language. (b Left) American children chose to be friends with a child who previously spoke English rather than French. (b Right) American children chose to be friends with a child who previously spoke English with a native accent rather than a French accent.
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