RACE PREFERENCE AND DISCRIMINATION CAPABILITIES IN BILINGUAL AND MONOLINGUAL 6-MONTH-OLDS

Abstract

Previous work studying the race preferences and discrimination abilities of 3-, 6-, and 9- month-old infants reveal a transitional period in face processing at 6 months of age. Two significant gaps exist in the literature. Firstly, current work is focused primarily on monolingual infants; secondly, whether 6-month-olds who show a null race preference are able to discriminate between faces of different races is unexplored. This study aimed to replicate previous race preference findings with monolingual and bilingual 6-month-old samples in a multilingual society, and explore if monolinguals and bilinguals differ in their ability to discriminate between different races at 6 months. Two paradigms relating to the two phenomena were tested on 24 Chinese bilingual and 16 Chinese monolingual 6-month-olds. Results showed that regardless of language background, 6-month-olds displayed an otherrace preference, as well as a differential ability to discriminate between faces depending on the race of the habituation face. The novel finding of an early other-race preference suggests new directions in studying face perception in multi-ethnic societies, and the results of the race discrimination paradigm support the hypothesis that 6-month-old infants are in the process of losing the ability to holistically process other-race faces, adding to current literature on perceptual narrowing.