Native speakers are more likeable and knowledgeable, but foreign speakers are not bad: Disentangling language-based social preferences in early childhood.

Language is not only a communication tool but also a social marker that is used to categorize and divide people. By early childhood, monolingual English-speaking children tend to favor native English speakers as friends and informants. However, much of this literature relies on forced-choice methods, leaving open whether children's native language preference reflects greater liking of native speakers, disliking of foreign speakers, or both. Similarly, it is unclear whether children view native speakers as more knowledgeable or foreign speakers as lacking knowledge. This study sought to disentangle these possibilities using a 3-point rating scale to separately assess liking and epistemic judgments within the same child. Eighty-two 6-year-old native English-speaking children completed two tasks: a liking task, where they rated how much they liked native and foreign speakers, and a knowledge task, where they judged whether speakers would know the functions of familiar and novel objects. Children rated native speakers more favorably on both liking and knowledgeability than foreign speakers. However, they did not report disliking foreign speakers or consider them ignorant in all domains. While foreign speakers were judged less knowledgeable overall, they were still seen as knowledgeable for familiar objects. Both native and foreign speakers were rated as not knowledgeable for novel objects. Notably, children's liking and knowledge ratings of foreign speakers were correlated, but not for native speakers. These findings suggest that early language-based preferences reflect ingroup favoritism rather than outgroup dislike in early childhood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).