Adults' and children's reasoning about the potential of diverse groups.

Introduction: In two experiments, we examine the degree to which adults (Experiment 1) and children 5-to-8-years-old (Experiment 2) use diversity to infer a group's cooperative and innovative potential.

Methods: Participants heard a child-friendly vignette about a competition in which a homogenous and diverse group were competing to design the perfect toy. They were then probed using questions related to the group's innovative potential and cooperative potential and asked to justify their responses.

Language Experience Influences Sociolinguistic Development: The Role of Speaker Race and Language Attitudes on Bilingual and Monolingual Adults' Accent Processing.

Background/objectives: Speaker race and the listener's language experience (i.e., monolinguals vs.

Learning linguistic diversity: Listeners have race-based linguistic expectations, but only for phonological variation.

In three artificial language experiments, we explored the rate at which adults learned associations between linguistic variation and speaker characteristics. Within each of the experiments, we observed that listeners sociolinguistic learning occurred, regardless of whether the speaker characteristic is social (race and sex/gender) or nonsocial (hat wearing), or whether they heard a phonological or morphological variant. However, we found that listener's initial expectations of what social properties were predictive of linguistic variation differed, impacting overall performance.

20-month-olds selectively generalize newly learned word meanings based on cues to linguistic community membership.

A growing body of work suggests that speaker-race influences how infants and toddlers interpret the meanings of words. In two experiments, we explored the role of speaker-race on whether newly learned word-object pairs are generalized to new speakers. Seventy-two 20-month-olds were taught two word-object pairs from a familiar race speaker, and two different word-object pairs from an unfamiliar race speaker (four new pairs total).

Toddlers link social and speech variation during word learning.

Within a language, there is considerable variation in the pronunciations of words owing to social factors like age, gender, nationality, and race. In the present study, we investigate whether toddlers link social and linguistic variation during word learning. In Experiment 1, 24- to 26-month-old toddlers were exposed to two talkers whose front vowels differed systematically.

Putting Mutual Exclusivity in Context: Speaker Race Influences Monolingual and Bilingual Infants' Word-Learning Assumptions.

Previous work indicates mutual exclusivity in word learning in monolingual, but not bilingual toddlers. We asked whether this difference indicates distinct conceptual biases, or instead reflects best-guess heuristic use in the absence of context. We altered word-learning contexts by manipulating whether a familiar- or unfamiliar-race speaker introduced a novel word for an object with a known category label painted in a new color.

The Role of Audiovisual Speech in Fast-Mapping and Novel Word Retention in Monolingual and Bilingual 24-Month-Olds.

Three experiments examined the role of audiovisual speech on 24-month-old monolingual and bilinguals' performance in a fast-mapping task. In all three experiments, toddlers were exposed to familiar trials which tested their knowledge of known word-referent pairs, disambiguation trials in which novel word-referent pairs were indirectly learned, and retention trials which probed their recognition of the newly-learned word-referent pairs. In Experiment 1 ( = 48), lip movements were present during familiar and disambiguation trials, but not retention trials.

Preschoolers are sensitive to accent distance.

Can children tell how different a speaker's accent is from their own? In Experiment 1 (N = 84), four- and five-year-olds heard speakers with different accents and indicated where they thought each speaker lived relative to a reference point on a map that represented their current location. Five-year-olds generally placed speakers with stronger accents (as judged by adults) at more distant locations than speakers with weaker accents. In contrast, four-year-olds did not show differences in where they placed speakers with different accents.

Children's accent-based inferences depend on geographic background.

Young children make inferences about speakers based on their accents. Here, we show that these accent-based inferences are influenced by information about speakers' geographic backgrounds. In Experiment 1, 4- to 6-year-olds (N = 60) inferred that a speaker would be more likely to have the same cultural preferences as another speaker with the same accent than a speaker with a different accent; in Experiment 2 (N = 90), children made similar inferences about speakers' friendship preferences.

And then I saw her race: Race-based expectations affect infants' word processing.

How do our expectations about speakers shape speech perception? Adults' speech perception is influenced by social properties of the speaker (e.g., race).

Accent, Language, and Race: 4-6-Year-Old Children's Inferences Differ by Speaker Cue.

Three experiments examined 4- to 6-year-olds' use of potential cues to geographic background. In Experiment 1 (N = 72), 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 (N = 72), children at all ages used accent to infer where a speaker was born.

Read my lips: Visual speech influences word processing in infants.

What do infants hear when they read lips? In the present study, twelve-to-thirteen-month-old infants viewed a talking face produce familiar and unfamiliar words. The familiar words were of three types: in Experiment 1, they were produced correctly (e.g.

Where are you from? Preschoolers infer background from accent.

For adults, accent is an obvious indicator of a speaker's geographical background. The current study investigated whether preschoolers are sensitive to the relationship between background and accent. Experiment 1 shows that 3- to 5-year-olds believe that two speakers who share the same accent live in the same place but do not share the same personal preferences.