Sociolinguistic development in a diverse, multilinguistic environment: Evidence from multilingual children in Gujarat, India

IF 1.8 3区 心理学 Q3 PSYCHOLOGY, DEVELOPMENTAL Cognitive Development Pub Date : 2024-10-01 DOI:10.1016/j.cogdev.2024.101504
Ruthe Foushee , Sophie Regan , Roya Baharloo , Mahesh Srinivasan
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Abstract

In today’s pluralistic societies, children regularly acquire multiple languages and are exposed to an even larger set of languages spoken by others in their environment. Yet despite the prevalence of multilingualism globally, most research on sociolinguistic development has focused on monolingual children in environments with relatively little linguistic diversity, and as such has left questions of what children take different languages to socially signify largely unaddressed. The present study aimed to fill this gap by tracing the development of social inferences about different languages among 129 multilingual 7- to 13-year-olds in Gujarat, India. Contrary to the prediction that children in multilingual contexts should be unlikely to make stereotyping inferences about a person speaking a language (e.g., because they might expect the person to know additional languages), children in our sample selectively linked the different languages and language varieties that we probed (Gujarati, Marathi, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, American English, Indian English, and Mandarin Chinese) with different social dimensions—including facial appearance, geographic origin, religion, and wealth. Children’s responses generally reflected associations grounded in real-world regularities, but also reflected some associations that do not have a real-world basis (e.g., judging that Indian English speakers tend to be white, Christian, and originate from outside of India). Older children were also more likely to predict different languages to be differentially learnable by individuals of specific ethnicities, exhibiting a kind of essentialist belief. We discuss our findings in light of the sociolinguistic study of personae.
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多元化、多语言环境中的社会语言发展:来自印度古吉拉特邦多语种儿童的证据
在当今多元化社会中,儿童经常习得多种语言,并接触到环境中其他人所说的更多语言。然而,尽管全球范围内多语言现象十分普遍,但大多数有关社会语言发展的研究都集中在语言多样性相对较少的环境中使用单语的儿童身上,因此,关于儿童认为不同语言在社会上意味着什么的问题在很大程度上没有得到解决。本研究旨在通过追踪印度古吉拉特邦 129 名 7 至 13 岁多语种儿童对不同语言的社会推断能力的发展,填补这一空白。根据预测,在多语言环境中,儿童不太可能对讲一种语言的人进行刻板印象推断(例如,因为他们可能会认为这个人还会其他语言),与此相反,在我们的样本中,儿童选择性地将我们探究的不同语言和语言变体(古吉拉特语、马拉地语、印地语、乌尔都语、泰米尔语、美式英语、印度英语和汉语普通话)与不同的社会维度联系起来,包括面部外貌、地理出身、宗教信仰和财富。儿童的回答一般反映了基于现实世界规律的联想,但也反映了一些没有现实世界基础的联想(例如,判断讲印度英语的人往往是白人、基督徒和来自印度以外的地方)。年龄较大的儿童也更倾向于预测特定种族的人学习不同语言的能力不同,表现出一种本质主义信念。我们将根据社会语言学中的 "角色 "研究来讨论我们的发现。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
3.20
自引率
5.60%
发文量
114
期刊介绍: Cognitive Development contains the very best empirical and theoretical work on the development of perception, memory, language, concepts, thinking, problem solving, metacognition, and social cognition. Criteria for acceptance of articles will be: significance of the work to issues of current interest, substance of the argument, and clarity of expression. For purposes of publication in Cognitive Development, moral and social development will be considered part of cognitive development when they are related to the development of knowledge or thought processes.
期刊最新文献
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