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Updated: May 25, 2026
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Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization
Published on: April 19, 2017
Children's essentialist reasoning about language and race
Katherine D Kinzler1, Jocelyn B Dautel
1Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, 5848 S. University Ave., Chicago, IL 60637, USA. kinzler@uchicago.edu
Developmental Science
|January 19, 2012
Summary
Young children prioritize language over race stability, but minority children and older children favor race. This reveals developmental shifts in understanding social categories.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Social Cognition
- Human Categorization
Background:
- Children's understanding of social categories like race and language is crucial for social development.
- Essentialist reasoning, the belief that categories have underlying, stable essences, influences how children perceive social groups.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate children's essentialist reasoning regarding the lifespan stability of race versus language.
- To compare reasoning across different age groups (5-6 vs. 9-10 years) and racial backgrounds (European American vs. African American).
Main Methods:
- Four studies presented monolingual children with images of children of different races and voices speaking different languages.
- Participants chose which adult a target child would become: a race-match or a language-match.
Main Results:
- Five- to six-year-old European American children favored the language-match, indicating language perceived as more stable than race.
- Nine- to ten-year-old European American children and 5-6-year-old African American children favored the race-match.
- African American children's reasoning suggests minority group status may emphasize race as a stable category.
Conclusions:
- Children's reasoning about the stability of social categories develops over time and is influenced by racial group membership.
- Young children may intuitively grasp language stability over racial stability, a perception that shifts with age and experience.
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