Speaker Race Influences Word-Learning Strategies in Monolingual and Bilingual Infants

• In Event: 2-095 - Word Learning in Monolingual and Bilingual Children: A Developmental Story of the Mutual Exclusivity Bias

Integrative Statement

From a very early age we are sensitive to race. For example, at 3 months, infants prefer to attend to same-race faces over other-race faces (Kelly et al., 2005), and by 9 months, infants categorize faces by race and only recognize individual same-race faces (e.g., Anzures et al., 2010). There is some evidence that infants use race as a linguistic marker. For example, a speaker’s race influenced 16-month-olds’ recognition of familiar and unfamiliar pronunciations (e.g., “dog” vs. “dag”) of familiar words (Weatherhead & White, 2018). Infants accepted only familiar pronunciations from a same-race speaker, but accepted both familiar and unfamiliar pronunciations from an other-race speaker. This suggests that by 16-months, infants have race-based linguistic expectations.
In the current study we explore whether these types of expectations influence the word learning strategies implemented by 18-month-olds. In general, infants and toddlers show a whole object bias in learning words for objects. That is, new words belong to the whole object, not a part or characteristic of it. However, previous work has demonstrated that linguistic experience shapes word-learning assumptions. When the label for one referent in a visual display is already known, monolingual infants will infer that new labels belong to new referents, or characteristics of known referents (referred to as a disambiguation response), whereas bilinguals accept a second label for an already labeled object category (Kandhadai et al., 2017). This difference is thought to be driven by different experiences in how many labels referents in their environment typically have (i.e., 1 vs. 2). However, to date, these studies have not considered the role that socio-indexical information may play during word learning.
In the current study, mono-racial monolingual and bilingual 18-month-olds heard a novel label (e.g., “zabe”) for a familiar object with a salient color (e.g., an aqua-coloured dog) (see Kandhadai et al., 2017). They were subsequently tested with two trials that probed whether they interpreted the word as a second category label for the object (another word meaning dog) or as a label for one of the object’s salient properties, namely its colour (a word meaning aqua). Critically, the speaker who labelled the object was either a Same-race or Other-race speaker (between subjects).
Interestingly, while there was a main effect of Speaker (Same-race vs. Other-race), F(1, 44) = 15.92, p < .001, there was no effect of prior language experience (monolingual vs. bilingual) p = .177. Both monolinguals and bilingual infants interpreted the novel word as a second object category label for the familiar object when the Other-race Speaker labelled it, t(23) = 2.40, p = .025. In contrast, both groups interpreted the novel word as referring to the colour of the familiar object when the Same-race Speaker labelled it, t(23) = 3.24, p = .004. Thus, regardless of language experience, infants hold similar linguistic expectations for Same-race and Other-race speakers. Importantly, infants’ assumptions about Same-race and Other-race speakers affect which strategies are implemented during word learning.

Authors

• Drew Weatherhead, University of British Columbia
  Presenting Author

• Priya Kandhadai, Douglas College
  Non-Presenting Author

• Geoff Hall, University of British Columbia
  Non-Presenting Author

• Janet F. Werker, University of British Columbia
  Non-Presenting Author