Incredible vs. Increíble: What's the Difference?

8/24/17

My last team meeting of the summer was today, which was really bittersweet because while we had a great discussion, the wonderful time I had spent in the lab was over. We read Preverbal infants infer third-party social structure based on linguistic group by Liberman, Woodward, and Kinzler (2016). It looked at 9-month-olds’ ability to determine whether two strangers (who either spoke the same language or spoke different ones) should affiliate (shown with a wave and smile) or disengage (shown by turning away from each other with arms crossed). This was measured in looking time as infants look longer at events that they feel are inconsistent with what they have observed in everyday life). There were two conditions that were based on which language the actors in the video were speaking: English-English or English-Spanish. The two actors took turns talking about the weather or grocery shopping (not towards each other but facing forward) in their respective language, then the actors were shown to either affiliate or disengage based on body language.

The results showed that the infants looked longer when English-English speakers disengaged and when the English-Spanish speakers affiliated. In other words, they found it unusual and surprising when two people who spoke the same language avoided each other and when two people who speak different languages acted friendly towards each other, which is pretty incredible when you realize that a 9-month old can barely grasp objects or stand up and are drooling after sticking just about everything in their mouths, but it’s important not to underestimate their minds! We started talking about the infant brain’s amazing ability to literally crunch statistics in order to learn about their world when it comes to language and the way that they can discern words from the ever-flowing stream of words that is typical conversation. It’s amazing that before these infants can even talk, they’re able to pick up on the subtle inflections, cadences, syllables, and tonalities that distinguish different languages. Also amazingly, they are able to infer social relationships between two total strangers solely based on the language they speak.

Overall I am so grateful for the chance to have been a part of the UW Madison Social Kids Lab this summer! I learned so much about the different social domains of our everyday world and how children think about gender, race, social status, disability, friendship, and food. I learned a lot about research methodology, the existing literature on child development, but mainly the manner in which children form opinions about their social world as well as ways to intervene in order to prevent biases from forming. If children are the blank-slate origin of everything human in our future, then I want to know what we can do to make that future the most accepting and best as it can possibly be, and the Social Kids Lab showed me so many avenues through which that can vision be made possible.