Does Children's Developing Understanding of Linguistic Register Impact Their Social Preferences?

ABSTRACT People use different communication patterns based on the context and who they are addressing. These differences, known as linguistic register, are common across human speech and recognized early in development. Here, we examine 4–11‐year‐old American children's ( N = 227) ability to use linguistic registers to determine a speaker's addressee as well as their social preferences for people who use correct registers. Although children's ability to recognize linguistic registers improved with age, even the youngest children tested (Ages 4 and 5) could correctly identify a speaker's addressee and preferred speakers who had spoken “correctly” over those who made register errors. Interestingly, language background—measured by the amount of exposure children had to non‐English language(s)—did not change children's preferences for people who spoke “correctly,” and instead only impacted children's expectations about the likely target of foreign speech. Our work suggests that the development of linguistic register comprehension is nuanced, depending on a multitude of factors such as variety in social experience, and opens avenues for future research examining differences in linguistic register understanding and use across development.