Poster #119 - Children’s Understanding of Foreigner Talk and Use of Cues in Identifying Foreign Addressees

• In Event: 1-005 - Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Section - Language, Communication

Integrative Statement

Introduction:
Speakers adjust their language depending on their interlocutor. For instance, speakers may talk at a higher pitched, sing-song tone when addressing babies. These different styles of speech are registers. Children understand and use registers like Baby Talk at an early age (Shatz & Gelman, 1973). However, less work has investigated when children understand Foreigner Talk –a register intended for use when talking to non-native speakers. marked by slow, loud, and over-enunciated simplified speech (Ferguson, 1975). Although some claim that Foreigner Talk helps bridge communication, others suggest it acts as a social distancing tool. Given that children categorize people by non-native accent early on (Kinzler, Dupoux, & Spelke, 2007), understanding when and how children understand the purpose of Foreigner Talk opens the door to study the developmental effects of native/non-native speaker communication on reasoning about non-native speakers. As such, these studies seek to establish a developmental timeline for children’s understanding of Foreigner Talk as well as what kinds of cues children use to determine who receives it.
Study 1:
In Study 1, 124 4-8-year-old children and adults were tested on their ability to match registers to their intended addressee (adapted from Wagner et al., 2014). Participants heard four registers: Baby, Peer, Teacher, and Foreigner Talk –Foreigner Talk being the focal test. In each of twelve trials, participants heard a clip of one register and were presented with a target and distractor addressee. After listening to the speaker, they selected who they thought was the intended addressee. Adults successfully selected the target addressee for all registers and did so at similar rates. In contrast, children got more accurate in selecting Foreigner Talk’s addressee with age (see Figure 1). Although 4-year-olds did not select Foreigner Talk’s target addressee above chance, they did so for Baby Talk and Peer Talk. Furthermore, 5-year-olds were above chance for Foreigner Talk but not Teacher Talk.
Study 2:
In Study 2, 94 5-8-year-old children and adults completed a register match task manipulating three addressee cues: language, appearance, and origin. Participants were tested in a similar paradigm to Study 1 but only heard Foreigner Talk and Peer Talk. In each of twelve trials, one cue differed between the target and distractor addressee, so they varied only in their language ability (knowing English vs. learning English), appearance (White girl in typical American clothes vs. Quechua girl in traditional clothes), and origin (from nearby vs. from far away). Children used all cues to determine Foreigner Talk’s addressee, adults only used language and appearance, and all participants more often selected the target addressee presented with Peer Talk than Foreigner Talk (see Table 1 for results).
Discussion:
Our results suggest that, with age, children are better able to match Foreigner Talk with target addressees. However, despite Foreigner Talk being intended for non-native speakers, no age group used language alone to determine who received Foreigner Talk. Children used language, appearance, and origin to make such decisions, suggesting that early on, children may simply assign Foreigner Talk to outgroup members.

Authors

• Danielle Labotka, University of Michigan
  Presenting Author

• Susan Gelman, University of Michigan
  Non-Presenting Author