The Role of Dialect, Gender, and Race in Children’s Friendship Choices: Evidence from Mexican Monolinguals and Mexican-American Bilinguals

This work investigated whether Mexican-American bilingual children and Mexican monolingual children (ages 4-6; <i>N</i> = 245) use Spanish varieties (Puerto Rican vs. Mexican) when making friendship judgments for themselves (1^st person) and/or for others (3^rd person), and whether children prioritize dialect varieties over race and gender categories. On a dialect discrimination task, both groups of children distinguished between the Spanish varieties. When choosing a friend for themselves (1^st person judgments), both groups of children preferred a character who spoke their own dialect (Mexican Spanish over Puerto Rican Spanish), but only when gender and race were held constant; this preference was stronger for monolingual Mexican children than for bilingual Mexican-American children. In contrast, neither group used dialect cues to guide judgments about others' friendship preferences (3^rd person). For Mexican monolingual children, their friendship judgments (on both 1^st and 3^rd person tasks, when gender and race were held constant) were related to their ability to discriminate between the dialects, but this was not the case for bilinguals. Finally, neither group made use of dialect variety in their social judgments when this factor was pitted against a character's gender or race. Instead, both groups predominantly used gender as a basis for friendship judgments. These results indicate an early sensitivity to linguistic dialect in young children's social judgments, as well as boundary conditions on the use of this information. The findings also reveal differences in children's use of dialect cues as a function of the linguistic and cultural context in which they live in.