Shibboleth, Sibboleth: early developing language prejudices
Languages have often been used to judge people, and a series of experiments by Kinzler et al, the native language of social cognition (doi:10.1073/pnas.0705345104), shows that this prejudice emerges early in development.
To start with, the authors showed a group of 5-6 month old infants two videos of adult females speaking American English. In the second video, however, the sound was played backwards. Despite the reversed speech having a similar temporal structure and sound spectrum, the infants preferred the “natural” speech condition.
They then did a similar experiment, but compared a video of American English to a video in Spanish. Once again, the infants (a new group of them), preferred to watch the person speaking in English - the language they were familiar with.
To test the effects of this bias on social interactions, the authors took a group of slightly older infants (10 months), and shown videos in English and French. Once the speaking was over, the ladies on the videos silently offered the infants a toy. Once again, the infants preferred the speakers of their own language, and tried to get the toy off them instead of the other speaker. So - the infants social interactions were heavily influenced by their language.
To follow this finding up, the authors took some young English-speaking children (5 years old), and showed them photographs of two unfamiliar children. The children then heard the unfamiliar children speak in French or English. When asked who they would rather be friends with, the children strongly preferred the child who spoke the same language as they did. Moreover, in another experiment, the authors showed that the children preferred speakers who had the same accent as them, over a speaker who spoke English, but had a different accent.
All in all, these results quite strongly point to an early developing social preference for speakers of the same language. Depressing, eh?
The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan leading
to Ephraim, and whenever a survivour of Ephraim said,
“Let me go over,” the men of Gilead asked him, “Are
you an Ephraimite?” If he replied, “No,” they said, “All
right, say Shibboleth.” If he said, “Sibboleth,” because
he could not pronounce the word correctly, they seized
him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two
thousand Ephraimites were killed at that time.
Judges 12:5– 6.
Posted on 
July 18th, 2007 by 
Simon Greenhill
2 Responses to “Shibboleth, Sibboleth: early developing language prejudices”
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Email Henry Updates to Me
July 19th, 2007 at 1:06 pm
What this study points to, is not necessarily exactly “a social preference for speakers of the same language”. Rather, babies that age have *heard* American English, Japanese, Russian, Zulu, or whatever, since the day they were born. They recognize, and are familiar with it. Something “unfamiliar” doesn’t sound like Mommy and Daddy, aunt and uncle, etc. It’s the only world they know. This is a “social preference” in a way, but how on earth do young kids(if they have this “prejudice” in the first place) rather easily learn *another* language, if their family ends up somewhere where another language is spoken? But they do. Furthermore, the article seems to be confusing prejudice(which has to be taught; e.g., “don’t trust ‘them’”) with preferriing the familiar, which all of us do. I can certainly telly you of my own experience along this line, which would seem to contradict the Biblical story in some pretty basic ways. When I was a good deal younger than I am now, I spent two years in Texas. When I first arrived there, everybody seemed to be talking “Southern”. Well, two or three weeks passed, and I didn’t “hear” the “Southern” any more. Everyone sounded “normal” “Texan” had become “familiar”. Moral: scientific results can be overinterpreted.
Anne G
July 20th, 2007 at 2:55 am
Thanks for the comment Anne,
Unfortunately the authors don’t try to examine what might be causing this - it could just be something like the mere exposure effect, however it does appear to be a strong in-group bias towards people who speak a different language.
This is not to say, of course, that people can’t get over it - as you point out in your example.
As for prejudice/preference - I’m not sure if there’s that much difference between the two words. Most of the research done in this area is exploring these implicit prejudices (this is the term that’s used), which are these simple response biases towards some outgroup. Sure, it’s not the same as, say, hating people with a certain skin color or whatever, but the theoretical position as I understand it is that these are overlapping concepts.
Oh - and please don’t think that I consider the bible to be a good authority on understanding humans :)
Thanks!
Simon