Cognitive Development, 12, 213-238 (1997) ©1997 Ab/ex Publishing

ISSN 0885-2014 All rights of reproduction reserved.

What Young Children Think About the

Relationship Between Language Variation and
Social Difference

Lawrence A. Hirschfeld
Susan A. Gelman
University of Michigan

Previous work suggests that preschoolers understand that members of some

social groups (e.g .. based on occupation or gender) speak in distinct ways. but
do not understand that members of other social groups (e.g .. based on race,
culture, or nationality) speak different languages. In these four studies we
explored preschool children's inferences about language and social group
membership. In Smdy 1 we found that preschoolers believed that minority
race individuals, people wearing unfamiliar clothing, or people living in unfa-
miliar dwellings were more likely to speak an unfamiliar foreign language
than to speak English. Studies 2A and 2B showed that children do not map
social group differences to language for all social categories. Specifically,
children were more likely to attribute language differences to racial rather
than age differences and were more likely to map differences in music prefer-
ence onto age than racial differences. Results of Study 3 showed children's
inferences about language and social group differences were not derived from
differences in intelligibility. Study 4 provides insight into why children
readily make these language to social kind mappings by identifying a com-
mon property that both broad social kinds and distinct languages are thought
to share. Together these studies provide evidence that even preschoolers may

This research was supported by NSF grant SBR-9319796 to the first author and NSF grant BNS-
9100348 and a J. S. Guggenheim fellowship to the second author. Portions of the research were pre-
sented at the Biennial Meetings of the Society for Research on Child Development, Seattle, Washing-
ton, April 1991. We are grateful to Ada Haiman-Arena, Brenda Courin, Mary Dwyer Dankosk.i, Nicole
Fleischman, Katie Heffernan, Charles Lord, Michel Rose, and Heidi Schweingruber for help with the
experiments. We would also like to thank Tessa Hirschfeld-Stoler, Doug Jones. Renato Kipnis, Conrad
Kottak, Betty Kottak, Juliet Kottak, Rosani Prado, Roy Rappaport, and Susan Wagner for providing
speech samples, and Bruce Harold for help in preparing the speech stimuli. We gratefully acknowledge
all of the children who participated in this research, and the staffs of the Uni verity of Michigan's Chil-
dren's Center and Center for Working Families, the Child Care Center, and the Jack and Jill Leaming
Center.

Direct all correspondence to: Lawrence A. Hirschfeld, University of Michigan, Department of

Anthropology, 500 South State Street, Ann Arbor, Ml 48109-1382 <lhirsch@umich.edu>.

Manuscript received July 28, 1994; revision accepted January 20, 1997 213
214 L.A. Hirschfeld and S.A. Gelman

be coordinating knowledge across content domains in a coherent and mean-

ingful way that underwrites the projection of existing knowledge to unknown
instances.

All children encounter tremendous: variation in the language >:poken around them.
These differences include: (1) individual variation in language (e.g., each person
has a distinct, recognizable voice); (2) a rich array of differences in register asso-
ciated with the speaker's social group (e.g., gender or occupation), social role
(e.g., subordinate), or social context (e.g., school vs. playground); (3) dialect dif-
ferences reflecting regional origin or social class of the speaker; and (4) differ-
ences in language itself (e.g., English vs. Spanish). Clearly, knowing how an
individual speaks is informative of the sort of person that individual is. Con-
versely, knowing the sort of person an individual is provides reliable evidence
about the way that individual is likely to speak.
Given the range of associations between vanat10n in speech and social kind sta-
tus, one major task for children is to determine which features of language are rel-
evant to which kinds of social distinctions. How children match up language and
soda! varialion has impli<.:aliuus fur Liu;: kimb uf inferences they make about the
diversity in language that they confront daily. Language differences (such as dia-
lect) are important (though fallible) cues to a range of nonlinguistic behaviors.
Even if children ignore language variation between individuals (as they do for
many intra-individual differences, see Eimas, Miller & Jusczyk, 1987), this would
lead children to overlook important information regarding the social world.
In this article we examine the associations that young children draw between
differences in language and social kind status. It it plausible that children learn to
map differences in speech and language onto differences in social status through
direct observation; they encounter different kinds of people and different social
statuses among those kinds and note that these differences correlate reliably with
differences in the way people speak. It is also possible that this process is facili-
tated, particularly for contrasts that are rarely encountered, by other, possibly
domain-specific principles. In particular, the goal of the following studies is to
shed light on when and why children come to associate differences in language
spoken (e.g., English vs. Portuguese) with some social kinds more than with oth-
ers. As a starting point, we adopt a distinction drawn by Hirschfeld (1996)
between social kinds that potentially reproduce independently (e.g., race, culture,
nationality) with social kinds that typically reproduce interdependently (e.g., age
groups, and gender). 1

1In contrasting social kinds that potentially reproduce independently to those that typically repro-

duce interdependently, we mean to capture the folk belief that some groups require other groups in
order to reproduce (e.g., men and women) whereas others do not (e.g .. doctors and lawyers). For an
extended discussion of this issue see Hirschfeld ( 1996).
language Variation and Social Difference 215

Children's Understanding of the Relation between Language and

Social Variation
The mapping between language differences and variations among people is com-
pk:x and potentially conflicting. Some social groups are slrongly associated wilh
unique languages (e.g., South Asians and Hindi). Other social groups are associ-
ated with distinctive styles of speech but not unique languages (e.g., older vs.
younger speakers, males vs. females). Some social groups are associated with
both unique languages and distinctive ways of speaking within a language (e.g., in
some people's minds, Latinos are associated both with Spanish and a particular
way of speaking English). How children think about these mappings is informa-
tive both of their understanding of the scope and nature of variation in language
but also the scope and nature of different social kinds. As Chomsky (1988, p. 188)
notes: "Somehow, young children have a theory of society and a theory of lan-
guage, and they are able to link them up in some fashion to indicate that you speak
this language in this social situation."
Several studies have found that young children understand that different speech
styles are related to variation in context and the social status or social group mem-
bership of speakers and listeners (see Becker, 1982; Sachs & Devin, 1976, for
reviews). For example, Andersen (1990) found that, when children ages 4 to 7
years are asked to Lake on different soda! rules (e.g., "talk like a du1,.;tur/tead1e1/
mother"), they vary their speech along a number of dimensions (e.g., register,
word choice, syntactic devices). In a study examining children's spontaneous role-
play with peers at nursery school (Corsaro, 1979), even younger children (2.5 to
5.5 years) produced appropriately modified language according to the familial or
occupational role they were enacting (e.g., using more baby talk and requests for
permission when taking on a subordinate role than when assuming a superordinate
role).
In addition to this knowledge about within-language variation, children under-
stand that people speak different languages. It is unclear, however, when this
knowledge emerges. We know that even quite young children are sensitive to a
variety of language differences. For example, by 2 days of age, infants can recog-
nize their own mother's voice, thus distinguishing one individual from another
(DeCasper & Fifer, 1980). Infants can also discriminate their mother's native lan-
guage from that of other languages (Mehler, Jusczyk, Lambertz, Halsted, Berton-
cini & Amiel-Tison, 1988). Similarly, bilingual children are skilled at keeping
their two languages distinct (Grosjean, 1982; Lindholm & Padilla, 1977;
Redlinger & Park, 1980) and can select the appropriate language to use for the
appropriate context and speaker(s) (Grosjean, 1982; Volterra & Taeschner, 1978).
However. the evidence described above does not tell us whether chilrlren can
reflect on their knowledge or can recruit it to make inferences. For example, anec-
dotal evidence suggests that young children can become fluent in more than one
language before recognizing that they are in fact speaking more than one language
216 L.A. Hirschfeld and S.A. Gelman

(Chomsky, 1988; Vihman, 1985). The most extensive study on these issues was
conducted by Kuczaj and Harbaugh (1982; Kuczaj, 1989). In their work, pre-
school children understood that not all people speak the same way; that animals,
plants, and vehicles neither talk like nor speak the same language as the child; and
even that people who speak the same language may talk differently from one
another. However, it was not until age six that children consistently inferrecl that
people from a different culture would speak a different language. (Differences in
culture were indicated by full-body photographs of people of various races in eth-
nic clothing and appropriate context; e.g., Black tribesman in jungle village.) Sim-
ilarly, Piaget and Weil (1951) and Jahoda (1963) found that children 6 years and
older cited language differences as evidence for national differences, and shared
language as evidence for lack of national differences.
Taken together, this literature indicates that children map language onto certain
social group differences. By preschool age, children map within-language varia-
tion (such as register) onto social group differences (e.g., Andersen, 1990; Cor-
saro, 1979). In contrast, children du nut n::liably map uifft::n::nt languages onto
social group differences until roughly 6 years of age. However, the latter results
must be viewed with caution, because two of the studies examining language dif-
ferences used categories that children may not know much about (i.e., nation-
states) (Jahoda, 1963; Piaget & Weil, 1951 ). The one study that did look at
younger children's beliefs (i.e., Kuczaj & Harbaugh, 1982) used stimuli that col-
lapsed across several social dimensions that may be distinct for children of this age
(race, clothing, and scene) and used ambiguous wording.
A further issue is how children establish such mappings. Piaget and Weil (1951)
and Jahoda (1963) provide evidence of an ad-hoc acquisition. They found that
children's knowledge of unfamiliar countries was extremely varied and apparently
shaped by specific local events (e.g., television reports). In contrast, Kuczaj and
Harbaugh's (1982) findings are consistent with the emergence of a more general
understanding: children do not learn tu map language;: auu ~ocial group differences
instance by instance. "Instead, they appear to learn the importance of cultural vari-
ation per se in a relatively broad sense" (p. 225), although not before middle-child-
hood. However, we do not know how coherent these beliefs are. Ramsey ( 1987, p
61), in a study of younger children's belief about ethnicities concludes that pre-
schoolers' ideas about cultural differences,

are vague and undifferentiated associations rather than coherent concepts. Several children
have explained that people eat with chopsticks 'because they speak Spanish· (or French or
English. rarely Chinese). In other words. unfamiliar behaviors are linked together. but not in a
meaningful way.

Nonetheless, anecdotal data suggest that even younger children may associate
language and social group differences. Slobin (1978) reports the following
exchange;: with his 3 yc;:ar, 3 munth old daughter while traveling in Europe: "'Do
we speak English because we're from Engly?' I explain, and then ask: 'Where's
Language Variation and Social Difference 217

German from?' She answers: 'Germny ... Germy.' I go on: 'Russian?' 'Rushy'
'Turkish?' 'Turkey.' 'Italian?' 'Talmy"' (p. 48). Kuczaj and Harbaugh (1982)
report that Kuczaj's 2 year, 7 month old son declared without prompting that
natives of Pennsylvania, Texas, and Minnesota spoke different languages_
This last anecdote is especially intriguing because it suggests that preschoolers
may map language and social group differences in a meaningful way not obvi-
ously derived from personal experience. What would account for this? One possi-
bility is that children's expectations about language and social kind are governed
by one or several naive theories about both language and social kinds. By theory,
we mean a coherent conceptual structure that specifies the phenomena that fall
under the theory and the explanatory mechanisms that apply to those phenomena
(see Carey, 1985). Theories, on this account, differ from non-explanatory concep-
tual associations, what Gopnik and Wellman ( 1994) call "empirical typologies and
generalizations."
Clearly, young children's knowledge of language and social kinds is theory-like
to the extent that they can use knowledge of social kind to predict linguistic behav-
ior and vice versa. A vast literature also suggests that children's knuwlt::dgt: of
social kinds coheres into a rich conceptual system. A few studies have examined
children's understanding of social kinds like social status or class (Corsaro, 1979),
friends (Corsaro, 1985), and kinfolk (sec Hirschfeld, 1989a, for a review). Most of
the relevant literature, however, explores children's understanding of race and
gender. These studies suggest that theory-like reasoning about social kinds
emerges quite early: even preschool children spontaneously partition humans into
categories and use membership in these categories to make inferences about prop-
erties and traits that are quite removed from the apparent features of the category
itself (see Aboud. 1988: Hirschfeld. 1996: Katz, 1982: Maccoby, 1988). Much of
this past research examines children's stereotypes and the valuative properties and
traits that these stereotypes encompass. Taking race as an example, by 3 years of
age children readily infer that members of one racial group are dirty, untrustwor-
thy, and dull while members of another racial group are clean, honest, and bright
(Clark & Clark, 1940; Phinney & Rotheram, 1987).
Hirschfeld ( l 989b) sketches an explanation of why knowledge of social kinds
and knowledge of language differences may become linked. Reviewing the liter-
ature on such mappings, he proposed that the awareness of multiple languages
derives from knowledge of intrinsic social differences. According to his argument,
the awareness of multiple languages does not emerge out of the child reflecting on
linguistic evidence alone. As already noted, bilingual children are able to keep lan-
guages distinct and to recruit one language in certain social situations and the
other language in other contexts long before they are able to reflect on the fact that
there are multiple languages. Hirschfeld argued that children do this because the
awareness of multiple languages is not meta-linguistic in nature, but meta-social.
However, he does not thoroughly articulate why this seemingly meta-linguistic
218 L.A. Hirschfeld and S.A. Gelman

awareness might be linked to meta-social understanding, nor does he explain what

properties of language might lend themselves to such a construal.
In summary, there is ample evidence that during the late preschool years there
are important developments in the several areas of knowledge reviewed above.
First, children become increasingly aware that language variation can predict vari-
ation in a range of social statuses, and vice versa. Second, toward the end of the
preschool years children begin to show a reliable awareness that multiple lan-
guages exist. Third, during this same period children's naive understanding of
society emerges and undergoes substantial development. Fourth, there is anec-
dotal support for the claim that by age 5 children can closely articulate their under-
standing of language difference with their understanding of social kinds like
nationality and race.
Still, a number of questions remain unresolved. A first issue concerns when chil-
dren begin to associate distinct languages reliably with social group differences.
Distinct languages are enduring characteristics, and so provide an opportunity to
assess children's beliefs concerning social groups that ;irt> i>s:pt>cially stahle. A sec-
ond open issue concerns the scope of children's understanding. Specifically, which
social categories do children associate with language differences, and to what
extent do children appropriately limit the range of these associations? A third issue
involves which properties of language children rely on when linking linguistic and
social variation. Finally, we do not know what aspects of language and social kinds
children may recruit in mapping differences in one onto differences in the other.
We conducted four studies in order to explore these questtons. In contrast to ear-
lier studies, we focused on younger, preschool-age children. To clarify the task, we
used actual speech samples in an unfamiliar foreign language. In Study l we asked
preschoolers to infer the language spoken by people varying in race, clothing, and
dwelling. Studies 2A and 2B are control studies, examining the limits regarding
which social differences are mapped onto language. Study 3 demonstrates that the
effects of Studies 1, 2A, and 2B cannot bi> attrih11tt>ri to the intelligihility of the for-
eign speech samples. Finally, Study 4 explores whether children believe that lan-
guages and social kinds share a fundamental property that might account for the
robust nature of the cross-domain mappings.
Studies 2B, 3, and 4 test children's expectations about the link between racial
and linguistic differences. Race was used as the dimension of contrast in these
studies because it is a cultural marker about which there is much research which
serves as both a theoretical and methodological guide.
Although the present studies examine children's beliefs about the links between
language and both race and culture, it is not because we assume a clear one-to-one
relation between any pair of the three (race and culture. race and language, or cul-
ture and language). Indeed, it is obvious that people of different races (within a
country) do not necessarily speak different languages, or even speak differently.
Thus, the purpose of the pre<;ent set of studies was not to examine the full extent
of children's knowledge in this area-that is, the extent to which children under-
Language Variation and Social Difference 219

stand the complex relations that actually exist. Rather, our interest was in demon-
strating that children consider language to be an index of the kind of person
someone is, and to provide insight into the possible specificity of that knowledge
development.

STUDY 1
Method

Participants. Thirty-six children in three groups participated in the experi-

ment (Group 1: ages 2;7 to 3;4, M = 3;0; Group 2: ages 3;6 to 4;5, M =4:0; Group
3: ages 4;8 to 5;4, M = 5;0). All children attended one of two university-affiliated
preschools. An additional 9 children (3;6 to 4;4, M = 4;0) participated in a pretest
of the materials. Twenty-two undergraduates attending an introductory anthropol-
ogy course also participated. Information regarding p!!rtic:ipants' race was not
obtained. However, participants were recruited from schools representative of a
mid-western community that is predominantly white.
Materials. Prior to the main la:;k. 1:ad1 participant was presented with a pair of
color drawings depicting a cow and a little boy. In the main task, each participant
saw 14 picture sets, each consisting of a pair of color drawings that contrasted on
one of four dimensions:

1. Race (black vs. white). Four picture-pairs matched a white person with a
black person of the same sex, two sets with women and two with men.
2. Clothing (western vs. nonwestem ethnic apparel). Four picture pairs
matched a person wearing familiar western clothing with a person wearing
nonwestem apparel. The nonwestem pictures depicted traditional Mongo-
lian, Spanish, Malay, and Scandinavian clothing. Two of the sets portrayed
women, two portrayed men. Race did not vary within a picture set.
3. Dwelling (western vs. nonwestem traditional architecture). Four picture
pairs matched familiar Wt:1>lt:rn 1t::>idc:ntial architecture with nonwestem
architecture (specifically, a North African tent. a bamboo house with
thatched roof, a subSaharan African clay cone-shaped house, and a Native
American tepee).
4. Orientation Controls (for each pair, the same adult facing forward vs. back-
ward). Two picture pairs matched views of the same person from the front
and from the back. One pair portrayed a black woman, the other a white
woman. These items were included to test whether children would map lan-
guage variation onto an irrelevant dimension of difference.

A prestudy was conducted to ensure that children could distinguish between the
western and nonwestem items. Nine children were shown the clothing and dwell-
ing picture sets and asked "Which one is dressed more like your Dad/Mom?" (for
220 LA. Hirschfeld and S.A. Gelman

the clothing items) and "Which is more like your house?" (for the dwelling items).
All children answered more than half the dwelling items correctly, p < .01, bino-
mial test, and 7 of 9 answered more than half the clothing items correctly, p < .05,
one-tailed binomial. In addition, children were shown the orientation and race pic-
ture pairs and asked to identify the person facing forward (for the orientation
item!':) and the hlack person (for the race items). All children correctly chose the
forward facing and black individuals in all cases.
In the actual experiment, 30 audiotaped sound segments were used with the
adults and the two groups of older children; 16 were used with the group of young-
est children. All children received 2 pretest items, a realistic "mooing" sound and
a child saying "Hello, how are you?" The remaining 28 (or 14) consisted of 14 (or
7) Portuguese and 14 (or 7) English segments. We wanted to choose a contrast lan-
guage that would be unfamiliar to most if not all the children. The Portuguese-
speaking community of the town in which children were tested is quite small
(indeed we had some difficulty finding English/Portuguese bilinguals when we
prepared our stimuli). Thus, Portuguese is likely to be relatively unfamiliar to the
children tested, as compared to languages which are more often found on TV or
spoken by members of this midwestem University town, such as Spanish or Chi-
nese. Each of rhe sound segments wa~ umka 10 seconds in length. All had the
same content: "He told me yesterday that he was going to be there very soon" and
a Portuguese version of the same sentence: "Ele me disse ontem que estaria af
mais tardc." We chose a sentence that hud vague semantic content in order to min-
imize any semantic cues that children might use in making judgments. Four adult
bilingual speakers provided the segments: the two men provided 6 speech seg-
ments each (3 English, 3 Portuguese); the two women provided 8 speech segments
each (4 English, 4 Portuguese).
Procedure. Children were tested individually in a familiar, quiet room near
their classroom. They were told that tht:y wuuld be playing a game with pictures
and sounds. They were shown the tape recorder. Two simple pretest questions
were included in order to familiarize children with the task. As children looked
at the pretest pictures they heard un audiotaped segment of the "moo" sound.
Participants were asked to identify which picture of the pair produced the sound.
Following this, children were shown a second cow/child picture pair, were asked
to listen to a second segment of the audiotape in which a child says "Hello, how
are you?", and then were asked to identify which of the pair produced the
sound. All children identified the correct picture in each of the two pretest tri-
als. Each child was then shown the experimental picture sets one at a time and
told:

'"Here are two (men/women/houses). Listen carefully to the voice. and tell me which (man/
wum;.m) ;, talking." [Or in the case of houses where no person wus depicted, '"and tell me
which house the voice is coming from."]
Language Variation and Social Difference 221

• English
F2l Portuguese

0
3-year-olds 4-year-olds 5-year-olds

Figure 1. Mean Number of Times White or Western Item was chosen by Language
and Age Group

Each picture-pair was presented twice--once with an English sentence and

once with a Portuguese sentence. For the adults and the two older child groups, we
used two random orders of sound and four different orders of the pictures. The pic-
tures were randomized with the constraint that they map onto the sounds appro-
priately (e.g., male voices onto male pictures). Children in the youngest group
listened to only one order; half were given the first half, half the second half.
Adult<> received the same questions_ However, they were given the pretest and
main tasks in the form of a questionnaire, and the pictures were presented in a sin-
gle order via overhead projector.
Results. Both children's and adults' responses were scored 1 if they selected
the forward facing person (for the control trials), the white person (for the race tri-
als), or the western item (for the clothing and dwelling trials), and scored as 0 oth-
erwise. The scores of the children in the youngest age group were doubled, to
compensate for the fact that these children received half as many items. We first
present analyses for the children, followed by analyses comparing children's per-
formance to adults'_
Children. The data for the race, dwelling, and clothing trials were summed
across items in each domain and entered into a 3 (age) X 3 (domain: race, dwell-
ing, and clothing) X 2 (language: Portuguese vs. English) analysis of variance
(ANOVA). The results are shown in Figure 1. A significant main effect for Ian-
222 L.A. Hirschfeld and S.A. Gelman

guage was obtained showing that children selected the white and western items
more when hearing English than Portuguese, F(l,33) = 71.84, p < .0001. Further-
more, a significant Age X Language effect emerged indicating that this effect was
more powerful for the oldest age group, F{2,33) = 16.89, p < .0001. Nonetheless,
follow-up simple effects analyses revealed that there was a significant language
effect at each age: for ".'I-year-olds, F( 1,33) = 4.13. p < .05; for 4-year-olds. fl 1.33)
= 9.28, p < .01; for 5-year-olds, F(l,33) = 92.21, p < .0001.
Although there were no significant effects involving domain, we examined lan-
guage effects in each domain separately. Simple effects analyses revealed that
there was a significant language effect for each domain (race, clothes, and dwell-
ing), allps < .001.
We also analyzed the performance of the front/back control items in a separate
3 (age) X 2 (language) ANOVA. The analysis revealed an Age X Language inter-
action, F(2,33) = 4.58, p < .02. Simple effects analysis indicated that there was a
significant language effect only for the 3-year-olds, F( 1,33) = 11.17, p < .005. For
4- and )-year-olds, Fs were less than l. Three-year-olds tended to attribute rhe
English utterances to people facing forward (M = 1.83 out of 2), but did not do so
for the Portuguese utterances (M = 0.67 out of 2). The older children selected the
fu1 wwu fadng pi1:tu1e no greater thai1 chance for both languages (4-ycar-olds: Jl.f
= 0.92 [Portuguese] and M = 1.08 [English]; 5-year-olds: M = 1.08 [Portuguese]
and M = 1.1 7 [English]) .
Adults. We compared the adult responses to those of the children, which were
collapsed into a single age group in view of the consistency in their performance.
A 2 (age: children vs. adults) x 3 (domain: race vs. clothing vs. dwelling) x 2 (lan-
guage: English vs. Portuguese) ANOVA revealed a significant main effect for lan-
guage, F(l.58) = 91.521. p < .0001, and a significant Age x Language x Domain
interaction, F(2, 116) = 6.62, p < .002. No other significant main effects or inter-
actions were found.
In order to facilitate interpretation of the three-way interaction we re-presented
the data in the form of a difference score (English minus Portuguese), and con-
ducted simple effects analyses on the Age x Domain ANOVA. There was a non-
significant tendency toward a domain difference among the children, F(2,l 16) =
2.68, p = .07, and a significant domain difference among the adults, F(2, 116) =
4.09,p < .02. Among the adults, the difference score for race (M = 1.21) was less
than that for clothing (M = 2.17) or dwelling (M =2.21). Among the children, the
domain differences, though not significant, were the reverse of that for adults (Ms
for race= 1.89; clothing= 1.17; dwelling = 1.36). In sum, adults were less likely
to map language differences onto the race items than they were to map them onto
the clothing and dwelling items. This indicates that adults are less confident about
the association between race and language than the association of either clothing
or dwelling and language. In contrast, preschoolers were ns likely to map language
differences onto race as they were to the map them onto clothing and dwelling.
Language Variation and Social Difference 223

An analysis of adult performance on the front/back control items revealed that,

like the older children, adults were as likely to map western and white items onto
Portuguese (M = 1.30 out of 2) as onto English (M = 1.21 out of 2). The means do
not differ significantly from one another and neither mean differs from cham.:t:.
Discussion
For all three contrasts, participants in all age groups reliably mapped language dif-
ferences onto the social contrasts tested (race, clothing, and dwelling). The results
of the control task suggest that 4- and 5-year-olds and adults were not using a sim-
ple strategy of matching nonEnglish to a noncanonical picture (e.g., unfamiliar
speech [Portuguese] goes with unfamiliar picture [tepee]), because they were as
likely to attribute English as Portuguese to the backward facing pictures (which
are anomalous poses for a portrait). Children in the youngest age group, in con-
trast, were more likely to attribute Portuguese to the backward facing person, and
thus we cannot rule out the possibility that they were relying on a simple strategy
for mapping noncanonical items with a foreign language. On the other hand, one
possible n~ason that the 3-year-olds consistently linked language to front/back on
the control task is that they may have some initial understanding that someone
turned away from the listener is less likely to produce intelligible speech than
someone facing the listener. We also do not know if children distinguish between
sorts of social kinds when mapping differences in language to differences in social
kind. Studies 2A and 2B further explore the basis for children's judgments.

STUDIES 2A & 2B
Studies 2A and 2D arc dcmonstrational control studies examining the degree to
which preschoolers will attribute language differences to any social contrasts. In
them we explore whether children will attribute language differences to social
contrasts that are not indicative of potentially indepenrlf'ntly rf'prnducing social
kinds. We selected two such contrasts: age and preferences. The logic behind these
choices is straightforward. Neither age nor preferences are generally an appropri-
ate dimension on which to map differences in language spoken.

STUDY 2A: AGE AND LANGUAGE TASK

Although children are sensitive to age group differences (Pope Edwards, 1984;
Taylor & Gelman, 1993) and recognize that age differences are predictive of cer-
tain intralanguage differences, specifically in speech register (Becker, 1982; Cor-
saro, 1979), age is generally not an appropriate dimension on which to map
language differences. If children attribute language variation to any recognized
social contrast, then they should be as likely to attribute language differences to
diffen:nct:s in agt: a:s tht:y a1t: tu uiffe1enccs in race, clothing, or dwelling. How-
224 L.A. Hirschfeld and S.A. Gelman

ever, if children realize that only some social contrasts are relevant to language dif-
ferences, then they should not map language differences onto age differences.
Method
Participants. Eleven children (ages 2;8 to 3;7, M = 3;1) participated in the
main task. Children attended the same university-affiliated preschools from which
children in Study l were drawn. None had participated in Study 1. In addition, 7
children (ages 2;3 to 3;3, M = 2;9) participated in pretesting the materials. Infor-
mation regarding participants' race was not gathered_
Materials. We preselected pictures of younger and older adults in order to find
pictures that children could reliably identify as older or not. Children participating
in the pretest were shown 6 picture pairs, each pair consisting of two color draw-
ings of adults of the same sex, laminated and mounted on 3" X 5" cards. Three
pairs were of males, three pairs were of females. The picture pairs contrasted in
age, one drawing depicting a youthful adult, the other a considerably older person.
(Older men were gray-haired, wrinkled, and partially bald, older women were
gray-haired and wrinkled.) Each child was shown the six picture sets in random-
ized order and asked which one looked most like a eranclmntht>r/grandfather_ We
selected the four picture sets that generated the best responses for the main task:
that is, items on which a minimum of five out of the seven children were correct
(children were 83% correct on the 4 items chosen).
Speech samples were a subset of those used in Study l. Each speech sample was
used with only one trial.
Procedure. All children were tested individually in a familiar room next to
their regular classroom. Children were given the same child/cow control items
used in Study 1. Again, all children correctly identified the cow with the "moo"
sound and the boy with the child's voice. Following these trials. each child was
presented twice with the four picture sets in randomized order. Children were
given the following instructions:

"Here are rwo men/women. Listen really caretully to the voice and tell me which man/woman
is talking."

The experimenter then played the audiotaped English and Portuguese speech sam-
ples used in Study 1 and children were given the opportunity to point. Two trials
were conducted with an English-speaking woman's voice, two with an English-
speaking man's voice, two with a Portuguese-speaking woman's voice, and two
with a Portuguese-speaking man's voice.
Results
Children's responses on each trial wen: assigned 1 if they selected the old person,
0 if they selected the young person. The data were summed across the four items
Language Variation and Social Difference 225

within each language. A paired t-test revealed no significant language difference,

indicating that children were as likely to attribute Portuguese to the old person (M
= 1.82 out of a possible 4.0) as they were to attribute English to the old person (M
= 2.0 out uf a possible:: 4.0). Neither score: is significantly different from chance.
These data, taken in conjunction with those of Study 1, suggest that 3-year-olds
(the youngest age group in Study 1) match language differences to some but not
all social contrasts. These data further suggest that even '.\-year-olds in making
their choices in Study 1 were not simply using a matching strategy (familiar voice
goes with canonical picture).

STUDY 2B: PREFERENCES AND LANGUAGE

Study 1 is consistent with the claim that young children map language differ-
ences onto differences in potentially independently reproducing social kinds.
We have taken differences in dress, architecture, and race as indicative of this
sort of social kind. The manner in which one dresses and designs a home also
im.lkatt:s uifft:rt:rn.:es in pt eferences, and, a:s already observed, children associ-
ate racial category membership with some similar preferences. Accordingly, the
results of Study 1 are consistent with a more modest claim; namely, that young
children map language differences onto any patterned difference in behavior or
proclivity. On this alternative account, it is not the case that children believe
specifically that race is predictive of language differences. Rather, children note
the racial contrast in items and map it onto whatever behavioral contrast the
experimenter presents. If this is the case, then children should map race onto
any contrast the experimenter provides. However, if children have a specific
belief that race is predictive of language differences, we should not find such a
general pattern.
In Study 2B we examine children's expectations about the relation between
race and music preferences as a way of ruling out this alternative interpretation.
We hypothesized that music preferences might be n dimension for young chil-
dren that maps onto differences in age (e.g., preferences for Big Band vs. folk
music), but not necessarily differences in race. Although a variety of dimen-
sions would be appropriate controls, musical preferences are somewhat analo-
gous to language in that they involve both listening and mental faculties (as
opposed, say, to preferences in sports). If children have a bias to map race onto
any behavioral contrast, then they should expect race to predict music prefer-
ences. However, if children have a specific belief that race and language are
linked, then children should not expect race and music preferences to be
related. 2

2
Wr:; "'" 151<1ldul lu D<tu Spr:;rbcr for suggesting this study.
226 L.A. Hirschfeld and S.A. Gelman

Method
Participants. Forty-two children in two groups participated (Group 1: ages
3;2 to 4;11, M =4;2; Group 2: ages 5;1to5;11, M =5;6). All children attended the
same university-affiliated preschools from which children in Studies 1 and 2A
were drawn. None had participated in the earlier studies.
Items. Sixteen picture sets were used, each consisting of color drawings of
adults and children. Each picture set depicted two groups of four individuals each.
Some groups consisted of two children and two adults, all of the same race (either
all black or all white). Other groups consisted of two white and two black individ-
uals, all of the same age (either all adults or all children). Within each picture set,
individuals were of the same sex (either all male or all female). Each picture set
accordingly contrasted a mixed race group with a mixed age group. For example,
one set consisted of a picture of four girls, two black and two white, and a picture
of four white females, two girls and two women.
Procedure. Children received 32 trials, consisting of sixteen picture sets pre-
sented twice. In one block children were asked about music preferences. In the
other block, they were asked about languages. The blocks were presented in coun-
terbalanced order. Preceding each block the child was briefly probed about his or
her knowledge of language variation or differences in musical preference, depend-
ing on the block. Preceding the language questions, each child heard:

"First I have some questions about language. What language do you speak?" fChild answers.)
"That's right you speak English" (or, if the child did not answer English; "You speak English
too, right?"). "Some people speak other languages like Spanish, Chinese. or French. Do you
know anyone who speaks another language?"

Preceding the music questions, each child heard:

"Now I have some questions about music. What kind of music do you like?" (Child answers.)
"Some people like other kinds of music, like rock 'n' roll or piano music. Do you know any-
one who likes other kmds ot music·!
After the child was given an opportunity to answer these questions, he or she was shown the
picture sets one at a time and asked to identify which group of people all like the same kind of
music or which group of people all speak the same language (depending on the block).

Results
Children's responses were scored for how often they chose the race-consistent pic-
ture. Data were summed across items and entered into a 2 (age) X 2 (question:
music versus language) ANOVA. The analysis revealed a significant age by ques-
tion interaction, F( 1,40) = 4.65, p < .05. Simple effects tests showed that 5-year-
olds were more likely to map language onto race (M 5.22 out of 8 possible) than
music onto race (M =4.17), F( 1.40) =6.06, p < .02, whereas younger children did
not distinguish between the two question types (language, M =3.96; music, M =
Language Variation and Social Difference 227

4.12). Only the 5-year-olds on the language questions performed above chance,
t(l7)= 1.87,p<.05.
Discussion of Studies 2A & 2B
The results of the age and preference control tasks suggest that although young
preschoolers map language differences onto noncanonical portrayals (specifi-
cally, front versus backward facing speakers), they do not map language differ-
ences onto any social contrast. This pattern of inference is all the more striking
given that the contrast used (age) indeed is associated with distinct styles of
speech. Although 3-year-olds link language differences onto the front/back con-
trol items in Study 1, they nonetheless link language with a limited range of social
kinds.
The results of the preference task indicate that older but not younger preschool-
ers do not map race onto any difference in behavior or proclivity When given the
opportunity to link music preferences to differences in age or race, 5-year-old chil-
dren were more likely to select the age items. On the other hand, when given the
opportunity to link language differences with age or race, children were more
likely to select the race items. This finding lends considerable support to the claim
that children expect language differences to map specifically onto potentially
independently reproducing social kinds. The younger children did not show this
pattern. However, it is difficult to interpret this result because the younger children
did not map language onto race as they had in Study l. With two sets of 4 pictures
each to consider, the information-processing demands of the task probably
exceeded the capacity of our younger participants.
The interpretation of the older children's performance would be suspect if
children simply knew more about language variation than variations in music
preferences. However, the questions that preceded the main preferem;t:: task sug-
gest that this possibility is unlikely. Recall that children were asked: ( l) what
language they spoke, (2) whether they knew anyone who spoke another lan-
guage, (3) what kind of music they preferred, and (4) whether they knew anyone
who preferred another kind of music. The response patterns for the language and
music questions were quite similar. Eighty-eight percent of the children could
name the language they speak; 98% could identify a type of music they like. In
contrast, only 53% of the children reported knowing someone who speaks
another language. Similarly, only 57% reported knowing someone who likes
another kind of music. In short, at least on the basis of this pretest measure, chil-
dren seem to be as knowledgeable about variations in music as they are about
language.
It is not evident from these findings, however, whether preschool children are
associating different social kinds with differences in language spoken or whether
they are associating different social kinds with differences in intelligibility of the
speech signal. Study 3 examines this question.
228 L.A. Hirschfeld and S.A. Gelman

STUDY3
The results of Studies l and 2 suggest that even preschoolers can coordinate
knowledge of social contrasts and knowledge of language variation. Study 3
examines whether children's judgments were based on the fact that one set of
speech samples was mtelhgible and the other unintelligible. That is, we test
whether children's attributions of social variation onto language are made wholly
on the basis of intelligibility. The question is of interest because intelligibility need
not involve reflection on language per sc-it could irn;tead involve the child's
awareness of her or his own mental state (comprehension vs. not). If children base
their judgments on intelligibility, they may be making inferences about them-
selves (e.g .. "I understand it, so someone like me should understand it;" "I can't
understand it, so someone different from me probably said it"). However, if they
base their judgments on a property of language (say, prosodic information), they
are making judgments about language itself.
One way to test this would be to render all speech samples unintelligible.
Mehler et al. ( 1988) showed that neonates discriminate between utterances in their
mothers' native language from those of another language, even when the speech
samples are distorted such that the speech is unintelligible to adults. Mehler et al.
electronically filtered speech samples so that only prosodic information was main-
tained and found that infants discriminated between native and nonnative lan-
guage utterances. These firnliug:s :suggest thi:tt i11fa11b 1 t:!y u11 pw.:suuii.: i.:ues a:s a
basis for classifying speech into different languages. In short, filtering offers an
opportunity to render speech uninterpretable while still retaining important cues
about the language.
It would be ideal to test 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds as a comparison to the earlier
studies, but pilot testing made it clear that the task was too difficult for children
below age five. The younger children tended to employ response biases (e.g.,
always picking the card on the left). This could well be due to having to deal with
the difficult speech samples (which are unlike any naturally-occuring speech
sound). In any case, we included just 5-year-olds in the main experiment.
Method
Participants. Twenty-five children (age 5;0 to 5;5, M = 5;2) participated in the
main experiment. All children attended the same university-affiliated preschools
from which children in the earlier studies were drawn. None had participated in
those studies. In addition, 12 adults took part in pretesting. The adults were
enrolled in an undergraduate course in anthropology.
Items. Eight picture sets were selected from those used in Studies 1 and 2.
These consisted of the two cow/child pretest items. the two front/back control
items, and the four race items. Six speech samples, three in Portuguese and three
in English, were produced using two bilingual speakers. As in Studies 1 and 2, the
male Portuguese and male English samples were produced by the same person,
Language Variation and Social Difference 229

and the female Portuguese and female English items were produced by the same
person. Unlike the samples used in Studies 1 and 2, samples in this study were
selected from audiotapes of on-going speech. Topic and content varied, and were
not controlled across the two languages. Segments began and ended at natural
clause boundaries. Fulluwing Mehler ct al.'s ( 1988) methodology, we prepared our
speech samples by low-pass filtering the utterances at 400 Hz. Like Mehler et al.,
we also adjusted the output levels on the playback equipment to compensate for
loss of intensity caused by the filtering process. To further compensate for the
unnaturalness of the samples, we used longer speech samples (approximately 15
sec each) than had been used in Studies l and 2.
Procedure. Because of two factors we decided to pretest the speech samples
to insure that they were discriminable by adults. First, the filtered speech samples,
while readily recognizable as speech, were markedly distorted. Both the English
and Portuguese were fully unintelligible. Second. although Mehler et al. (1988)
established that infants can distinguish between native and nonnative speech on
the basis of prosodic cues alone, it does not follow that older children or adults
would be able to make the same discriminations, especially when asked to make a
conscious choice. Some sound discrimination skills degrade with age (Trehub.
1976; Werker, 1989). Given these concerns, we pretested the stimuli with adults
who were given 20 trials, 10 in each language. Participants, who were tested indi-
vidually, were told that they would hear a tape ot muttted voices, some in English
and some not in English. They were then asked to identify each sample as either
English or not English (and were given the opportunity to listen to each item a sec-
ond time before they made their identification).
In the main task children were shown a large (approximately 14" tall) stuffed
bunny puppet with a central hand cavity. A small speaker from the audiotape
machine was placed in~idf' the h:md cavity. Participants were given the following
instructions:

See, here's a stuffed bunny. It's a funny bunny because there's a hole inside where someone
can Sil and hide. I have diffen:m friemh whu tuul<. tu111' 'ini111'; iu>iJc the: bunny and talking.
You can't hear them too well when they're inside; it sounds kind of like this [experimenter
demonstrates a very muffled voice]. I'm trying to figure out who was sitting inside the bunny
when they talked. Okay. here's my first friend. [The first picture pair is placed in front of the
child and the first speech sample is played.] Who do you think is inside the bunnyry

Children first heard the unmuffled cow/child voice items and were presented with
the cow/child picture sets. Following this, participants heard the six speech sam-
ples and were shown the six picture sets.
Results and Discussion
Adult responses were scored for accuracy, l indicating that they correctly identi-
fied the sample language. 0 indicating that they were incorrect in their identifica-
tion. Responses were summed across both (I) all items and (2) items within each
230 L.A. Hirschfeld and S.A. Gelman

language. Overall adults were much better than chance at identifying which utter-
ances were English and which were Portuguese (M = 15.92 of 20 in making cor-
rect identifications), t(ll) = 9.72, p < .0001. However, adults were better on the
Portuguese items (M = 8.75) than on the English ones (M:::: 7.25), t-paired (11) =
2.21, p < .05. Thus, it appears that the ability to discriminate between native and
other languages on the basis of prosodic cues alone is still present in adulthood.
As in Studies 1 and 2, children reliably distinguished between the English and
Portuguese utterances, choosing the black person more often for the Portuguese
(M = 1.44 out of 2) than the English (M = 0.96), t(24) = 2.61, p < .02. Comparing
the performance of each language against chance, we found that children's asso-
ciation of Portuguese with the black person was better than would be predicted by
chance, t(24) = 3.77, p < .001, but that English was associated with the white per-
son at chance, p > .7. As predicted, children were also at chance in their language
attributions to the control items of forward and backward facing people, choosing
the forward facing person a mean of 68% of time when hearing Portuguese and a
mean of 53% of the time when hearing English, ns.
These results replicate and extend the findings of Studies l and 2: 5-year-olds link
variations of language with differences in race. Their judgments, however, cannot
be attributed to a simple strategy of mapping race onto intelligible versus unintel-
ligible speech, because children mapped race and language even when all utter-
ances were equally unintelligible. In short, children made assumptions about who
uses a given type of speech based on properties of the language as opposed to mean-
ing alone. Like adults, whose judgments about language were better for a foreign
language than for English, 5-year-olds more reliably mapped a foreign language to
blacks than English to whit.es. Finally, children did not map the language difference
onto the socially irrelevant distinction of forward versus backward orientation.

STUDY 4
As observed earlier, the results of Studies l, 2A. and 2B are consistent with but not
unique to the possibility that preschoolers map difference in language spoken with
difference in broad social kinds. One further way to test this claim would be to
assess whether children associate differences in language spoken with and only
with social kinds that potentially reproduce independently. An obvious problem
with this strategy is that children have knowledge of more of these sorts of social
kinds than can be readily tested in a single study. Moreover, previous work by Hir-
schfeld ( 1995, 1996) strongly suggests that children's social kinds, although struc-
tured much like adults' social kinds, often include candidate kinds that adults
typically do not recognize. For example, quite young American children naturalize
occupation in ways that are inconsistent with adult ideation in America but con-
si:stcnt with adult bclit::f iu utht:r 1-:ultun::s (i.t:., in South Asia; Hirschft:hl, 1995,
1996). In short, children may well have a wider repertoire of potentially indepen-
dently reproducing social kinds than adults around them.
Language Variation and Social Difference 231

This finding, however, suggests an alternative strategy that we might use to

explore the nature and scope of children's language to social kind mappings. Chil-
dren may associate differences in language spoken with a limited range of social
kinds because they believe that certain social kinds and certain sorts of language
difference share important properties. In particular, we speculate that young chil-
dren naturalize both languages and potentially independently reproducing social
kinds. In other worlds, young children may believe that the reproduction of such
kinds is governed by natural. typically biological. processes. Several studks pro-
vide converging evidt"nce that even quite young children naturalize a range of
ontological kinds. For example, Gelman and Wellman (199 l) using an adoption
ta<;k found that children attribute an innate potential-an intrinsic potential that
provides an underlying continuity over changes occurring during growth-to liv-
ing kinds, both plants and nonhuman animals.
Employing a similar adoption task, Hirschfeld (1994b, 1995, 1996) presents
evidence that preschoolers make parallel inductions about racial kinds. In tht:st:
studies, Hirschfeld found that by age 4, children expected that a child born of a
black couple but immediately adopted by a white couple would grow up to have
black racial features. In short, they believe that traits diagnostic of race (dark ver-
sus light skin, curly versus straight hair, etc.) are fixed at birth. Springer (1995)
extended this finding in demonstrating that young children infer that innate poten-
tial governs the development of a number of nonracial biological traits (e.g., num-
ber of teeth), but not psychological states like belief or preference.
While adults generally believe that biological traits are inherited and thus fixed
at birth, few if any believe that language is similarly immutable and impervious to
environmental conditions. Indeed, few adults doubt that language is learned. Even
professional linguists, who otherwise typically argue that language acquisition is
closely governed by an innate competence, acknowledge that learning a specific
language is dependent on living in a specific language environment. As Gkitmau
(1986, p. 3) remarks, "To believe that special biological adaptations are a require-
ment [for language acquisition], it is enough to notice that all the children but none
of the dogs und cuts in the house acquire language. To believe that language is
nonetheless learned, it is sufficient to note the massive correlation between living
in France and learning French, and living in Germany and learning German."
To date there has been little study of whether children hold a comparable belief
about the learnability of language. Kuczaj and Harbaugh ( 1982) provide relevant
data. They found that children did not reliably believe that members of another
culture can learn to speak the child's language prior to age 7. However, the same
children were more confident of their own capacity for language learning: by 3
years of age over half the children tested expected that they could learn the lan-
guage of a person of another culture. This supports the claim that children hold
some version of the nunure hypothesis for language:: a1.:4ubitiuu. Kuct.:aj and Har-
baugh also present justification data suggesting that there is a uniqueness to first
language acquisition in infants, with children judging that "adults and older chil-
232 L.A. Hirschfeld and S.A. Gelman

dren need to go to school to learn another language ... whereas the infant and
young language-learning child does not have to go to schooi to learn his or her
native tongue" (p. 219). In this respect children are nativists about language, antic-
ipating that an infant will acquire language spontaneously. Thus, these results are
somewhat contradictory and do not resolve the question about what language chil-
dren think a child will "naturally" speak, the language of his or her birth parents or
the language of the people who raise the child. 3
We adopted a switched-at-birth task used by Hirschfeld (1994b, 1995, 1996),
Springer (199'.l), and Solomon, Johnson, Zaitchik, and Carey (1996) to explore
this issue. In the task, children are told of two families, one English speaking, the
other Portuguese-speaking, whose infants are inadvertently switched at birth.
Children then hear speech samples of each language and are asked which is the
language that the infant will speak when he or she grows up. The question
addressed is whether children use a "nurture" strategy, attributing language to
social contact :ind p:irpnting. or a "nature" strategy, attributing it to birth.
Method
Participants. Fifty-nine children in two groups (Group l: age 2;5 to 3;11, M =
3;6; Group 2: age 5;1 to5;1l,M=5;6) participated. All children attended the same
university-affiliated preschools from which children in the earlier studies were
drawn. None had participated in those studies.
Procedure. Children were tested individually in a familiar room. Four color-
wash pictures of couples were used. Half the children were shown pictures of two
white couples, half were shown pictures of two black couples. Each child received
one item. He/she was presented with pictures of two couples. and was told the fol-
lowing story:

[Experimenter indicate' first couple] "The,e two people u1e Mi. <tllU M1'. Smith, tlit:y >pt:al<
English. English sounds like this. [Experimenter plays a female English speech sample taken
from the stimuli used in Study I.] These two people are Mr. and Mrs. Jones, they speak Por-
tuguese. Portuguese sounds like this [Experimenter plays a female Portuguese speech sample
taken from the 'ti111uli u,t:u in Stuuy l .] Now Mrs. anu Mr. Smith had a baby girl. Thac means
thac the baby came out of Mrs. Smith's tummy. Right after it came out of her tummy, the
baby went to live with Mrs. and Mr. Jones. The haby lived with them and Mrs. and Mr. Jones
took care of her. They fed her and changed her diapers and hugged her when she cried. When
the baby learned to talk, did she speak like this [Experimenter plays a different Portuguese
female voice] or did she speak like this [Experimenter plays a different English female
voice]"

Both language spoken and race of the couples (which were always the same
within a trial) were counter-balanced.

3Therc is reason to believe that adult> tiuu a >imilar gue,tiuu at lc:aM imt:rt:sting. A wt:ll-l<nown and
probably apocryphal story tells of a king who had infants raised in isolation in hopes of determining
what language they "naturally" speak. Greek, Hebrew. ancient Egyptian, etc. (see. Wardhaugh. 1972).
 Language Variation and Social Difference 233

Results and Discussion

Children's responses were scored for whether they reasoned in accord with the
"nature" or "nurture" hypotheses. Participants received a 1 each time they chose
the language that matched the langm1ge of the hirth parents, and 0 each time they
chose the other language. If children's inductions are not governed by an expecta-
tion that the language a child will speak is fixed at birth, they should reason that the
child will speak the language of her adoptive parents. Conversely, if they expect
that language spoken is a natural property fixed at birth, they should infer that the
child will come to speak the language of her birth parents. By 5 years of age, chil-
dren clearly favor the ''nature" hypothesis, with over 2/3rds of these older pre-
schoolers choosing the language of the birth parents (M =.69, t(3 l) =2.25, p <
.05). Three-year-olds, in contrast, chose at random (M = .41).
These results provide a potential explanation for the early willingness to map
language onto race and cultural groups (as marked by clmhing and dwelling).
Young children may treat all of these as "natural" groupings. As already observed,
a hallmark feature of a naturalized kind is the expectation that the essential char-
acter of the kind is fixed at birth and largely impervious to environmental condi
tions. Older preschoolers' expectation that children will speak the language of
their biological parents despite being raised from birth by another couple that
speaks another language, accord<> with tht> claim that children helieve that lan-
guage is also natural (i.e., fixed at birth and impervious to many environmental
influences).

GENERAL DISCUSSION
Taken together, the results of these four studies extend our understanding of the
ways in which young children recruit knowledge about language differences to
make inferences about social difference, and conversely the ways they recruit
knowledge about social differences to draw inferences about language variation.
Stuuy 1 1.k111unstrates that pn;sd1uule1s udic:vc that minority race individuah,
people wearing unfamiliar clothing, and people living in unfamiliar dwellings
were more likely to speak an unfamiliar foreign language than to speak English.
Study 2A shows that young preschoolers mapped social group differences onto
language for some but not all social categories. In Study 2B we found that older
preschoolers were more likely to project language differences onto racial than age
differences, and were more likely to map differences in music preference onto age
than onto racial differences. The results of Study 3 indicate that children's infer-
ences about language and social group differences were derived from prosodic
cues, not from differences in intelligibility. In the final study, we provide an
explanation for why children make these mappings by showing that, in contrast to
the presumed adult model, children expect language to be a "natural" phenome-
non.
234 L.A. Hirschfeld and S.A. Gelman

These results indicate that even young children can coordinate their knowledge
of the social and linguistic worlds in ways that extend beyond those shown in prior
research. Whereas other researchers found that children did not consistently infer
that people from a different culture would speak a different language until age 6,
we found that even 3-year-olds make this association. Moreover, children's judg-
mt:nls Ju nul appear Lu bt: mallt: un an all hui..; basb, bul rt:fiei..;l au unllc1 :;tanlliug of
the way categories of language and society are linked. Furthermore, we demon-
strated that these judgments do not occur when children are asked to link mean-
ingful social variation to a nonlinguistic behavior like music preference.
The studies offer some evidence of the extent to which the range of everyday
experience provides a context for these inferences. Study 1 showed that language
differences are reliably mapped onto several social dimensions associated with
human groupings by both children and adults. Participants of all ages believe that
people who live in unfamiliar homes or wear unfamiliar costumes are likely to
speak an unfamiliar language. Given the ubiquity of the multicultural curriculum,
even at the preschool level, it is not implausible that children encounter materials
that generally would support this inference (although it is unlikely that children
have had direct experience with Portuguese).
Buth presdmulers anll allults bdit:vt: Lhal people who have llark.t:r skin art: also
more likely to speak Portuguese than English. The basis for this judgment is
unclear. On the one hand, the vast majority of blacks encountered by midwestern-
ers in the United States are native English speakers-and conversely, there is no
reason to expect that the percentage of nonnative English speakers is higher
among U.S. blacks than among U.S. whites. On the other hand, globally it is
undoubtedly the case that most blacks (and most whites) are not native English
speakers. While adults may have the necessary knowledge to base their inferences
on the language and social kind task, it is not obvious that most preschoolers can
avail themselves of the same facts about the larger world.
It is also striking that although both adults and children infer that people with
darker skin are more likely to speak Portuguese than English, participants in the
two age groups do not draw the inference with the same confidence. Recall that
d1ih..hcu wc1c ai..;Lually sumcwhal 111u1t: i..;uusislc11t in atllibuti11g Puilugucsc Lu
blacks than they were in attributing Portuguese to individuals wearing unfamiliar
clothing or living in unfamiliar dwellings (although the difference was not statis-
tically significant). Adults, in contrast, were less confident about the race-to-lan-
guage mappings than to either the clothes- or dwelling-to-language mappings. If
children's judgments are simply based on the adult model, it is not obvious why
there should be this difference in strength of attribution. This suggests that chil-
dren may construct these beliefs to some extent on their own, despite the lack of
supporting empirical evidence.
We suggest that children acquire these beliefs by spontaneously combining and
integrating knowledge across content domains. Other examples indicate that chil-
dren (and adults) come to new forms of understanding by coordinating knowledge
Language Variation and Social Difference 235

within and across domains (Bowerman, 1982; Karmiloff-Smith, 1979). For exam-
ple, both adults and older children know that some animals have bones and that
living things are arrayed in inclusion hierarchies. Adults and older children com-
bine these pieces of knowledge to make predictions about whether unfamiliar ani-
mals have bones (Lopez, Gelman, Gutheil, & Smith, 1992; Osherson, Smith,
Wilkie, Lopez, & Shafir, 1990; Smith, 1979).
Adults also coordinate knowledge across domains of reference, as when attrib-
uting intentions to nonliving things like chess-playing computers (Dennett, 1976).
Similarly, Carey (198-') and Inagaki and Harano (1987) have argued that children
use knowledge of a well-grounded domain about which they know a great deal
(specifically, belief/desire psychology) to extend their understanding of a domain
about which they know less (biological kinds). Typically such mappings are
thought to involve analogical transfers. Such transfers tum on the recognition that
phenomena (or the model of the phenomena) falling under two distinct domains
share relevant properties or other qualities. what Holyoak and Thagard (1995. p.
33) call isomorphisms.

when we consider the analogy between water waves and sound propogation, we are tyring to
build an isomorphiom between two internal models. Implkitly, we are acting as if our model
of water waves can be used to modify and improve our model of sound .... The basic analogi-
cal comparison ... is not between an internal model and the world but between two different
internal models.

Previous transfer studies disclose a paradox (Hirschfeld, 1994a). Although peo-

ple frequently draw inferences that plausibly rely on analogical transfer, attempts
to produce novel analogical transfers experimentally have not been altogether suc-
cessful (Novick, 1988; Resnick, 1994). With children this is particularly true of
cases involving cross-domain as opposed to within-domain transfers (Brown,
1990). Although our data speak to this issue only indirectly, we speculate that the
meaning children attribute to the structural elements in the respective models is
paramount. In the case of language-to-social-kind mappings, children may readily
draw the connection between language and potentially independently reproducing
social kinds because they recognize that each is characterized by a fundamental
property, viz., "is natural." Thus, although young children understand that age, like
race, is important and predictive of other properties (Andersen, 1990; Pope
Edwards, 1984; Taylor & Gelman, 1993 ), race differs from age in being an intrin-
sic or natural aspect of a person, fixed at birth, and immutable over the life span
(Hirschfeld, l 994b, 1995, 1996). Moreover, race-like clothing and architec-
ture-is a marker of stable, cultural group differences. Children also believe that
languages are properties of peoples. It is this common presumption that may
underlie children's judgments about language and social variation.
These findings shed considerable light on the nature of children's inferences
about both language and social kinds, and suggest one way in which knowledge is
coordinated across domains. However, a number of questions remain open. The
236 L.A. Hirschfeld and S.A. Gelman

tasks we employed clearly do not exhaustively detail what children know of the
relationship between language and social kinds. Among other things, the studies
that we report were conducted in a small midwestern university town which is pre-
dominantly white and overwhelmingly English-speaking. It is possible that chil-
dren living in a more diverse community might have different expectations about
the language-to-social-kind mappings or that such children might develop such
expectations more precociously. It is also plausible that children of color or chil-
dren from non-English-speaking households might have different expectations or
that their expectations might emerge somewhat differently. Second, Portuguese is
both phonemically and prosodically quite distinct from English. Children's map-
pings might differ if another stimulus language was used. Third, we relied on sev-
eral cultural markers to distinguish independent social kinds. Asking about other
markers, such as cuisine or religion, might yield different inductions about the
association between language and social kind.

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