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1	Children's Evaluations of Interlocutors in Foreigner Talk Contexts
	Labotka, Danielle. - 2020
	Abstract: A growing literature suggests accent serves as an important social category for infants and young children. Children show early social preferences for native over non-native speakers; this tendency may lay the foundation for future accent prejudice observed in adulthood. However, children do not hear non-native accents in a vacuum. Children’s experiences with accent take place within a broader communicative context, including how others respond to non-native accents. One factor that may be of particular importance is the speech register typically associated with native speakers talking to non-native speakers, a register known as Foreigner Talk. By exploring how Foreigner Talk may be used as social information by children, we can better understand how children learn about non-native speakers. This dissertation examined how and when children (5-10-year-olds; N = 424) and adults (N = 514) use registers as social information regarding addressees and/or speakers in native/non-native speaker interactions. Study 1 investigated the role of registers (Foreigner Talk, Baby Talk, Teacher Talk, and Peer Talk) in providing social information about addressees. Study 2 investigated how social information about an addressee (appearance, language, origin) is integrated with Foreigner Talk to inform evaluations. These studies provide evidence that children’s evaluations of addressees are informed by Foreigner Talk by 5.5 years and by an integration of both Foreigner Talk and other social information after 7. Like older children, adults incorporated register and social group information into their ratings. In Studies 3a and 3b, I investigated whether children use register as social information about speakers. In Study 3a, I examined a maximal contrast (i.e., Baby Talk vs. Teacher Talk), and found children (by age 5) evaluated speakers based on their register use, giving lower ratings to speakers who used Baby Talk; after 6, they began to use addressee social group membership to inform evaluations (e.g., lower ratings for a speaker who used Baby Talk with a teacher). In Study 3b, I studied whether Foreigner Talk use informs evaluations of speakers and found that, after 7, children gave higher ratings to speakers when their register mapped onto their addressee’s social group (e.g., Foreigner Talk to a foreign peer). In contrast, adults provided lower ratings to speakers who used Foreigner Talk. Study 4 brought together the elements examined in the previous studies by asking participants to evaluate both native and non-native speakers in conversations in which Foreigner Talk was or was not used to repair communication. Children (ages 5-10) did not account for the need for communication repair or non-native accent in their ratings of interlocutors, instead providing lower ratings to both speakers and addressees when Foreigner Talk was used than when it was not. In contrast, adults only provided lower ratings to native speakers who used Foreigner Talk. Together, these studies provide a first investigation into how register is used by children to learn about others. In all studies presented here, children’s evaluations of interlocutors (speakers and addressees) were affected by register use. Furthermore, the presented studies speak to the potential social ramifications of Foreigner Talk, highlighting that children often have negative evaluations of those who are the recipients of Foreigner Talk and those who use it. This provides future avenues of research for understanding how the interactions children observe between native and non-native speakers may reinforce their biased attitudes against non-native speakers. ; PHD ; Psychology ; University of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies ; https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/155151/1/dlabotka_1.pdf
	Keyword: Foreigner Talk; intergroup communication; linguistic register; Psychology; social cognition; Social Sciences
	URL: https://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/155151
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