The influence of language behavior in social preferences and selective trust of monolingual and bilingual children

Experiences living in a community where people share more than one language may affect children's strategies to selective learning. Language mixing may be one type of speakers' characteristics that bilingual children, but not monolingual children, use to evaluate speakers. A total of 120 English-speaking monolingual (n = 40) and English-Mandarin bilingual (n = 80) 4- and 5-year-olds heard a pair of speakers each tell a story either with or without language mixing and indicated their preferences for either speaker in friendship, explicit judgment, and novel label endorsement. Bilingual children, but not their monolingual counterparts, preferred the single-language speaker to the language-mix speaker across different test questions. Our findings suggest that social relevance in the larger communicative context may contribute to the development of children's social preferences and selective learning based on certain characteristics of the speakers.