Examining Children’s Essentialist Beliefs about Foreign-Accented Individuals

• In Event: 2-081 - New Directions in Social Essentialism Research

Integrative Statement

Although immigration is increasing around the world, immigrants are still discriminated against by members of the host country, as they are seen as competitors for resources like jobs, housing, and health care. Enduring discrimination toward immigrants could be exacerbated by their foreign accent, a salient marker of immigrant status that can elicit judgments about the speaker. As immigration continues to grow at rapid rates, researchers are keen to understand the potential origins of these negative attitudes. Psychological essentialism, the cognitive bias to view members of a category as sharing an underlying essence that is biologically-based, stable, and natural, has been linked to negative out-group attitudes. Children, as young as 4 years old, form essentialist beliefs about social categories such as race, gender, and language (Kinzler & Dautel, 2012; Rhodes & Gelman, 2009), however, less is known about whether children essentialize more subtle linguistic cues like accents. This present study investigates whether children have essentialist beliefs about foreign accented individuals (Chinese accents) hypothesizing that children will use accent to categorize individuals along discrete, natural boundaries similar to race and gender. However, in contrast to essentialist beliefs about race and gender, children will also hold beliefs that accents are changeable and influenced by environment.
To examine these questions, we collected data from 60 4-5-year-old native English speakers. Participants completed two tasks assessing essentialist beliefs for foreign accented individuals, one assessing stability and another assessing natural kinds. Children in the first task heard a foreign accent paired with an image of child, and was asked “if this child grows up in America, will he/she sound more like this adult (pointing to the one image and hearing a native accent) or this adult (pointing to the other image and hearing a foreign accent)?” People in the images were Chinese and gender-matched to participant (see Figure 1). They were also asked whether they thought the target child’s accent would change if they moved to a place where everyone around them speaks with a native English accent. The second essentialism measure was a task adapted from Rhodes and Gelman (2009). After introducing a puppet from “somewhere far away,” the experimenter explained that the visitor has paired people it thinks are the “same kind of person.” Participants were asked whether these judgments are “maybe right” or “wrong”. Each critical trial simultaneously displayed two child images, one foreign accented and one native-accented.
Results suggest that children believe foreign accents can be changed over time and with exposure to native-speaking environments, t(29) = 2.943, p = .006, d = 0.537. In addition, children are leaning more towards viewing foreign accent and native accented individuals as distinct kinds of people, p = .125. Thus, children are more likely to endorse essentialist beliefs about accents with respect to natural kinds but not stability. These results have important implications for understanding how and in what ways essentialism contributes to the negative attitudes toward foreign accented individuals who continue to live in the United States with a foreign accent.

Authors

• Christine Tai, University of Hawaii
  Presenting Author

• Yiyuan Xu, University of Hawaii at Manoa
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kristin Pauker, University of Hawaii
  Non-Presenting Author