A Review of “How You Say it”

Learning to communicate in one’s native language(s) is one of the most impressive accomplishments of the first few years of life. Developmental scientists have extensively detailed and debated how children accomplish this feat, recognizing that language acquisition is both an amazing developmental achievement (on its own) and foundational to the rest of the cognitive development – including to conceptual development, knowledge acquisition, memory, and education. Yet, despite all the attention the field has paid to language acquisition and its role in development, Katherine Kinzler’s comprehensive and beautifully written book, How You Say It, argues that we have largely overlooked one critical consequence – that learning one’s native language provides a fundamental sense of identity and lens for making sense of the social world. Kinzler builds this argument drawing from her own empirical work in developmental science and research from other subfields of psychology, as well as from an interdisciplinary perspective informed by sociology, linguistics, history, evolutionary biology, education, and law. Kinzler describes compelling evidence that children’s social responses are shaped by whether a potential social partner speaks like they do (in terms of language and accent). By five months, babies prefer to look at people who speak their native language or with a native accent (Kinzler, Dupoux, & Spelke, 2007). By 10-months, they prefer to take a toy from someone they previously saw speak in their native language (Kinzler, Dupoux, & Spelke, 2007), and expect people who speak the same language to affiliate with one another and have other things (e.g., food preferences) in common, but people who speak different languages to disengage from one another and have other differences (Liberman, Sullivan, Woodward, & Kinzler, 2016). By early childhood, these biases are explicit – children prefer to learn (even non-linguistic information) from people who speak their native language with their native accent (Kinzler, Corriveau, & Harris, 2011), explicitly say they would rather be friends with someone who speaks with their native accent (Kinzler, Shutts, DeJesus, & Spelke, 2009), and begin to endorse language-based stereotypes (e.g., about who is nicer or smarter; Kinzler & DeJesus, 2013). Kinzler argues that these finding stem from a basic tendency for people (including young children) to notice who speaks like them and treat this as a marker of who is in or out of their group. From this perspective, children’s differential treatment and responses to people who speak differently from them are not only about ease of communication; instead, sharing a native language fundamentally marks whether we see someone as like us or not. A range of controls supports the conclusion that the social effects of language are not reducible to ease of communication alone: children’s biases appear just as strong based on accent (when they can still understand the content of what someone is saying) as based on language (when they can’t); children’s biases show up even in non-linguistic contexts (e.g., babies prefer to look at people who speak their native language even when they are silent, and children prefer to learn how to use tools from people who speak with their native accent even if the tool demonstration is presented without language).