Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Prior research suggests that infants and children prefer people who speak with the same accent as their parents. Here, we investigated whether 13- to 18-month-old monolingual, American English-learning infants (N=39) and 5- to 8-year-old children from diverse linguistic backgrounds (N=87) use accent to predict social interactions. Participants were familiarized to novel blob-like, English-speaking characters. The central protagonist and one side character shared an accent, while the other side character did not. We varied whether the central character had an American or Chinese accent. In Study 1, when the protagonist in distress had an American accent, but not when the protagonist had a Chinese accent, infants looked first toward the side character with the different accent. In Study 2, 5- to 8-year-old children with American-accented parents were more likely to say that a Chinese-accented character caused distress in an American-accented character. These preliminary findings suggest that infants and children may use accent as a social cue to make inferences about antisocial intent.