On November 18, 2021,
Thomas St. Pierre presented Children's language attitudes and media.
Abstract
Throughout their daily lives, listeners routinely make inferences about others based on how they speak (e.g., their age, gender, SES, etc.). In many cases, these linguistic inferences are accompanied by social evaluations of speakers (e.g., how intelligent, friendly, confident they sound). My work explores the development of children's linguistic biases, looking specifically at children's evaluations of foreign-accented speakers. I will present work showing that children's language biases-rather than decrease as they get older-actually increase, as well as ongoing work looking at the possible role of media in both shaping children's language attitudes and mitigating linguistic biases.