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Updated: Aug 11, 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 infer speaker groups from variation in morphosyntactic patterns
Yiran Chen1, Lynna Tran2, Jenny Saffran1
1Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, United States.
Child Development
|August 10, 2026
Summary
Children can identify social groups by consistent language patterns, like specific word endings. This study shows young children learn sociolinguistic cues by observing deterministic, not probabilistic, language variations.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Linguistics
- Sociolinguistics
Background:
- Language variation signals social identity.
- Children acquire sociolinguistic knowledge as they join a language community.
- Previous research indicates children connect broad language varieties to social groups, but less is known about their use of specific linguistic features for group inference.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether young children can infer group membership based on specific language variations.
- To explore children's ability to use consistent morphosyntactic patterns for social categorization.
Main Methods:
- A semi-artificial language learning study involving 40 English-speaking children aged 5-6 years.
- Exposure to two alien groups with distinct plural marking rules.
- Testing children's ability to assign new aliens to groups based solely on their plural usage.
Main Results:
- Children successfully identified alien group membership when the mapping between plural marking and group was deterministic.
- Children did not succeed when the group-marker mappings were probabilistic.
- Findings suggest young children rely on consistent linguistic patterns for social inference.
Conclusions:
- Young children utilize consistent morphosyntactic patterns to infer group membership.
- This study introduces a novel method for examining sociolinguistic learning in children.
- Future research aims to incorporate more realistic social categories relevant to children.
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