Language preferences of infants

[Joel S. Berson]

Two paragraphs on the language preferences of infants from an article
about Elizabeth S. Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard,
written by Natalie Angier (NY Times, Science section, today).

"More recently, she and her colleagues have begun identifying some of
the baseline settings of infant social intelligence. Katherine D.
Kinzler, now of the University of Chicago, and Kristin Shutts, now at
the University of Wisconsin, have found that infants just a few weeks
old show a clear liking for people who use speech patterns the babies
have already been exposed to, and that includes the regional accents,
twangs, and R's or lack thereof. A baby from Boston not only gazes
longer at somebody speaking English than at somebody speaking French;
the baby gazes longest at a person who sounds like Click and Clack of
the radio show "Car Talk."

"In guiding early social leanings, accent trumps race. A white
American baby would rather accept food from a black English-speaking
adult than from a white Parisian, and a 5-year-old would rather
befriend a child of another race who sounds like a local than one of
the same race who has a foreign accent."

But I'm repelled by the vision of self-perpetuating generations of
a-rhotic Clicks and Clacks.  (Although I don't know whether those two
Bostonians in particular are a-rhotic.)

The article starts on
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/science/insights-in-human-knowledge-from-the-minds-of-babes.html?_r=1

Joel

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