WHAT YOUNG-CHILDREN THINK ABOUT THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LANGUAGE VARIATION AND SOCIAL DIFFERENCE

Previous work suggests that preschoolers understand that members of so me social groups (e.g., based on occupation or gender) speak in distin ct 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 abo ut language and social group membership. In Study 1 we found that pres choolers believed that minority race individuals, people wearing unfam iliar clothing, or people living in unfamiliar dwellings were more lik ely to speak an unfamiliar foreign language than to speak English. Stu dies 2A and 2B showed that children do not map social group difference s to language for all social categories. Specifically, children were m ore likely to attribute language differences to racial rather than age differences and were more likely to map differences in music preferen ce onto age than racial differences. Results of Study 3 showed childre n's inferences about language and social group differences were not de rived from differences in intelligibility. Study 4 provides insight in to why children readily make these language to social kind mappings by identifying a common property that both broad social kinds and distin ct languages are thought to share. Together these studies provide evid ence that even preschoolers may be coordinating knowledge across conte nt domains in a coherent and meaningful way that underwrites the proje ction of existing knowledge to unknown instances.