Being a team player: The influence of multiple group memberships on children's lexical choices

People use language to signal aspects of their social identity, in part by talking like (i.e., aligning with) those they identify with. Yet people identify with multiple individuals and groups at once, which may have different (and sometimes conflicting) communication styles that must be reconciled. Here, we investigated how 7- to 9-year-old children’s language choices (whose speech they align with) are shaped by the multiple, sometimes competing groups they belong to. During the experiment, children (N = 128; 64 cisgender girls and 64 cisgender boys; racially diverse; upper middle class) were assigned to a team (green or yellow) and played a virtual trivia game in which, on critical trials, they answered a question with more than one acceptable answer (e.g., blackboard or chalkboard) after hearing two teammates use one label, and two opponents use the other. We manipulated (1) whether teammates produced the label more common in the broader community (preferred) or the less common one (dispreferred labels), and (2) whether teammates shared the child’s gender (congruent condition) or their opponents did (incongruent condition). Overall, children aligned with their teammates, producing dispreferred labels more often when their teammates used them. However, this alignment was attenuated when teammates did not share children’s gender, indicating that children weighed both group memberships. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration that children’s lexical alignment is sensitive to the communication patterns of the multiple groups that children belong to.