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The Current Advances in Psychology (CAP) Colloquia Series, which highlights current advances in psychological research, continues its fifth season with a presentation by University of Chicago Professor Katherine Kinzler titled "The developmental origins of accent attitudes and language-based social preferences." Dr. Kinzler’s talk will be held on Wednesday, October 28 from 4:00-5:00 p.m. in Meyer Auditorium, Hotchkiss Hall. The lecture is free and open to the public. For more information call 847-234-3100.

Kinzler joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 2008 as a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in Psychology. She received her B.A. in Cognitive Science from Yale College, and her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from Harvard University in 2008. Her research focuses on the development of social cognition, with particular emphasis on investigating infants' and children's attention to language and accent as indicators of group membership.

In this talk, she will present evidence that the language and accent with which others speak guide children’s early social cognition. Before they speak themselves, infants prefer to look at, interact with, and eat foods first eaten by native speakers. Older children demonstrate express explicit positive judgments of those who speak their native language with a native accent. Children’s predilection for native speakers is not based exclusively on a preference for speech that is comprehensible, and infants’ and children’s preferences do not result from preferring any attributes that are relatively more familiar. Although both native-accent and same-race speakers are familiar to children, accent trumps race in guiding infants’ and children’s early social preferences. She proposes that children’s preferences based on language and accent reflect a specific predisposition to use language as a basis for categorizing the social world. This predisposition may have origins in human cognitive evolution.

The series is sponsored by Psi Chi, the Psychology Department, and the Center for Chicago Programs.

The CAP Series concludes on Tuesday, November 10th with Dr. Douglas Medin (Northwestern University).

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