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Abstract

While research has shed light on infants’ ability to recognize and even prefer their native language at a remarkably young age, little research has studied whether infants use language as an indicator of social groups. In this study, 8- to 14-month-old infants were familiarized with videos of two people who spoke the same or different languages, and then viewed videos of those two individuals affiliating or disengaging. This study is a replication of a 2017 study “Preverbal Infants Infer Third-Party Social Relationships Based on Language” by Liberman, Woodward, and Kinzler which found that infants expected two people who spoke the same language to be more likely to affiliate than two people who spoke different languages. While the 2017 study was conducted in-person in a laboratory setting with video stimuli projected on a large screen, this study was conducted remotely. This study was interested in learning whether the same patterns and findings from the 2017 study would be replicated in an online paradigm despite these differences. Results from this study showed no significant differences in infants’ expectations based on the language of the speakers. Thus, contrary to the 2017 study, we could not indicate whether infants use language to make inferences about third-party social relationships. Because we were unable to replicate findings from an in-person study, important implications can be made regarding the reproducibility of previously in-person studies to a remote setting.

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