Who can speak that language? Eleven-month-old infants have language-dependent expectations regarding speaker ethnicity

This research summary can be incorporated into a lecture or shared with students as a reading to demonstrate how psychological science explores the diversity of human experience. This resource can also be used to encourage students to identify the major components of a research study (i.e., the hypothesis or study question, sample, method, and findings). Students can be asked to identify potential limitations of the study and encouraged to discuss the implications for our understanding of human behavior. Keywords highlight how concepts within and across pillars are incorporated into a single research study.

This study hypothesized that infants make connections between the faces they see and the language they hear. The sample in this study was 11-month-old White infants living in Vancouver (Canada) who were learning English in their homes. Researchers played sentences in both English and Cantonese to infants while they showed them photos of White people and of Asian people. Their findings revealed that infants looked longer at the faces of Asian people when they were hearing Cantonese than English. When infants heard English, they looked equally at the faces of Asian and White people. The researchers then showed the same photos to the infants while playing these sentences in Spanish. This was done to see if babies who heard any unfamiliar language would look more at a person with an unfamiliar ethnicity. However, babies who heard Spanish looked equally at the White and Asian faces. These findings tell us that even young infants associate the language they hear with the speaker’s ethnicity. In other words, when babies learn language, they are not just learning specific sounds and words; they are also learning about who is speaking that language, based on what they have experienced in their environments. Specifically, babies in Vancouver have learned that both White and Asian people speak English, whereas only Asian people are likely to speak Cantonese.

May, L., Baron, A. S., & Werker, J. F. (2019). Who can speak that language? Eleven-month-old infants have language-dependent expectations regarding speaker ethnicity. Developmental Psychobiology, 61(6), 859–873. https://doi.org/10.1002/dev.21851opens in new window

Race, Development, Language, Infancy, Ethnicity

The development of resources to broaden diversity and representation in the teaching of high school psychology resources is an APA Committee of Teachers of Psychology in Secondary Schools initiative supported by funding from the American Psychological Foundation David and Carol Myers Fund. This resource was developed by Eric Castro, Shawn C.T. Jones, PhD, Allyn Olsen, and Catherine Sanderson, PhD.