The effect of foreigner talk on children’s evaluations of addressees

Abstract

Children evaluate others based on how they speak, but do children evaluate others based on how they are spoken to? We examined how U.S. children and adults (N = 170 5- to 10-year-olds, 49 % female; 107 adults; in a city with a foreign population of 17.9 %) evaluated addressees of Foreigner Talk (i.e., slow, loud, simplified speech). In Study 1, children and adults evaluated Foreigner Talk addressees more negatively than Peer Talk or Teacher Talk addressees. In Study 2, adults and older children incorporated Foreigner Talk with additional contextual cues to inform their evaluations: a local peer receiving Foreigner Talk received lower evaluations than a foreign peer receiving Foreigner Talk. With medium to large effect sizes, these studies indicate the importance of speech register in children’s social inferences.