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Effects of implied and explicit monolingualism on resource allocation by young monolingual and bilingual children

Wed, April 7, 10:15 to 11:15am EDT (10:15 to 11:15am EDT), Virtual

Abstract

From infancy, language is a powerful social group marker, such that monolingual children prefer those who speak their native language with a native accent (Kinzler, 2013). Although much research on linguistic biases has examined social preferences (e.g., who to trust or befriend), resource allocation tasks can offer insight into children’s willingness to materially advantage particular group members. Recent research suggests that monolingual children give more to native-accented speakers (Spence & Imuta, 2020), but no studies have examined how bilingual children’s resource allocation is influenced by language or accent. We hypothesize that monolinguals will allocate more to their linguistic in-group, but there are two competing possibilities for bilingual children: first, that they will show in-group bias only toward other bilinguals and second, that they will treat both monolinguals and bilinguals as in-group members (i.e., share resources equally with all speakers).

The current study disentangled these possibilities in 91 children aged 3-7 (62 English monolingual; 29 English-Spanish bilingual; mean age = 5.69y). Children listened to puppets express hunger across four language pairings [(1) native-accented English vs. Spanish, (2) native-accented English vs. Spanish-accented English, (3) Bilingual vs. native-accented English, and (4) Bilingual vs. Spanish] and shared five food items between the two puppets. The puppets’ bilingualism was indexed by fluent code-switching and monolingualism by lack of code-switching, consistent with prior studies. Using a mixed-model binary logistic regression, we found a main effect of child group (odds ratio=1.8, p=.039), such that monolingual children were more likely to share the majority of the food with the native-accented English speaker (Figure 1). In contrast, bilingual children did not show significant biases. Follow-up questions in which children were asked who they had more in common with and who they would rather befriend also found monolingual preferences for native-accented English (albeit weaker than preferences for resource allocation) and a lack of bilingual preferences.

One potential explanation for the lack of bias in the bilingual sample is that bilingual children assumed monolingual speakers were actually bilingual, but simply did not code-switch for the brief time they were speaking. To explicitly test this possibility, a subset of children (n=32; 20 monolingual; mean age=5.87y) completed two additional vignettes (English vs. Bilingual; Spanish vs. Bilingual) in which the non-bilingual puppet acknowledged their monolingualism (e.g., stated they did not understand Spanish words). This manipulation increased bilingual children’s biases toward bilingualism, particularly for the follow-up questions about who the children had more in common with (Figure 2).

The current study extends findings on the preferences of monolingual children to a resource allocation paradigm and offers novel insight into the complex way in which bilingual children process language and accent as social group markers. These results indicate important considerations when operationalizing language stimuli, particularly for young bilingual children who might assume that all speakers are bilingual. Findings also have implications for how in-group biases emerge early in development. Future research should consider measuring children’s meta-linguistic assumptions and examine how bilingual children’s broader linguistic environment influences their biases toward different language groups.

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