>As for the idea that "cognitive organs are fixed genetically...and not subject to non-pathological variation," I think it's nonsense. There is variation in all our essential organs. Why should my language acquisition module be identical to yours if there are differences in our hearts, lungs, kidneys, arms, and legs?

This is a good point.

I wonder how JRH would answer the question of accent and language usage. African-American children persist in speaking ebonically even though they are raised in modern America. Who causes that, I wonder?

African-American children persist in speaking ebonically even though they are raised in modern America. Who causes that, I wonder?

in the nurture assumption she does address the issue of dialects. in short, it is peer subcultures which persist in maintaining these accents. the studies i've seen suggest that these peer groups are also the ones that generate long term language evolution. the example she used was of latino kids in arizona who were asked how long they'd stayed in the USA even though they were born here because they persisted in using their ingroup accent to the outside world.

In-group dialects:

An adopted half-Vietnamese half-blak cousin of mine was raised by a white doctor in white America until she was about fourteen.

At which point she decided to speak Ebonics and dress black.

She has done so ever since.

Her black/Vietnamese brother, on the other hand, saw no reason to be "down wit' dat" and has continued to speak the King's English.

It makes for interesting Christmases when all the family comes home.

"n short, it is peer subcultures which persist in maintaining these accents"

Oh come on. Where does the peer group get its accents from?

Their parents.

Big Bill's example notwithstanding. yes, I've encountered these. They usually revert back to the natal accent after the requisite years of acting out.

Oh come on. Where does the peer group get its accents from? Their parents.

I don't have data, but all my friends with parents from English speaking countries like England and Australia have American accents. What accent do you think John Derbyshire's kids have?

i'm pretty sure that children picking up the accent of their peer group is pretty well documented, at least for US-UK immigrations.

now maybe very small children get their accents from their parents and then shift to a peer accent they get a peer group -- any data on that? i had a pretty crazy southern drawl when i was ... a kid

Edited By Siteowner

Getting back to differential psychology, one idea I'm waiting to see seriously pursued is pathogenic influence / control of the human brain, along the lines suggested by Cochran and Ewald. "Massive" modularity is the consensus in cog sci, which just gives the little fuckers more types of and more sophisticated instances of mental machinery to hijack to steer us toward their next host. I'm not talking the minority of side effects like schizophrenia -- 80-some % of France has toxoplasmosis, and Freedom Fries bullshit aside, 80-some % of France is not insane.

Take cat-lovers, like moi. People who aren't cat-lovers just can't get it, but cats -- and esp kitties -- to me are like little babies I care for, snuggle w/, etc. Perhaps a child is infected (w/ toxoplasma gondii or something else) early in life when it's vulnerable, the virus subtly tweaks the mind to program in a goal of seeking out and caring for cats as if they were human babies. You'd only have to change a single item in an IF-THEN statement, like:

IF output of incoming image decoder = stored mental image of baby,
THEN respond by executing 1, 2, 3...

Just change the word "baby" to "cat." Luckily cat faces aren't utterly different geometrically from human infant faces.

Then once we seek out and care for a cat, we pass the virus on to it -- by the cat coming near our bathroom (or outhouse or whatever), by not fully washing our hands before we prepare its food & water, not fully washing before we pet its face, by coughing near it or touching it w/ a coughed-on hand, etc. Now it's got the bug, which now reproduces, and passes on copies to any kids we have, who will in turn.... etc. Notice, the bug can't be too nasty or else it'll crash its vehicle before it reaches its next target, and thus be selected out. The more sophisticated the steps are to reach the host (i.e., find cat, house cat, procure food and water for cat, pet & snuggle w/ cat, etc.), the more undisturbed the virus has to leave the rest of our brain.

And as long as no appreciable average fitness cost is incurred to the hijacked vehicle, the bug reproduces benignly, somewhat like the mildest form of HIV -- passed on from mother to offspring, thus requiring a long healthy life. Perhaps certain destinations a certain pathogen seeks will require subtle, virtually fitness-neutral personality changes in the vehicle (e.g., more or less introverted).

Make no mistake: if you're a bug and you want to hijack a vehicle to get where you want to go, why hijack a slug's brain when you can hijack the most sophisticated, adaptable machine that thrives in almost all environments? Given the sheer magnitude of pathogens and their rapid rate of mutation, it would be surprising NOT to find any that had figured out how to subtly hijack the most all-terrain of vehicles.

This would also go a long way to accounting for non-genetic "cultural" variation -- the French have a culture where they tend to undercook their meat, and boom, they behave differently from the English b/c of the bugs they thereby ingest. Looks cultural, really just an infection.

Shite that was long, but I should've stated I don't think cat-lovers have their innate IF-THEN statement about babies changed, precluding the search for mates & thus a huge fitness cost. It would involve a simple "copy" operation of the innate baby statement, then a one-word change w/in that copy.

"I don't have data, but all my friends with parents from English speaking countries like England and Australia have American accents. What accent do you think John Derbyshire's kids have?"

Heh. I thought that this blog didn't deal with anecdotal evidence.

I knew someone would say this. And my parents had Yiddish-speaking parents. They picked up English "from the streets." (NO bilingual education!) All the immigrant kids of their generation did. And you could tell what their ethnicity was if you were blind--who was Italian, Irish or Jewish from subtle gradations in their accents. (But that proves nothing. You could say they got it from their peers, because most groups were not mixed then.)

They difference is that they weren't living in a ghetto. Black Americans do. A self-created ghetto. They are a nation within a nation. Their parents inculcate speech patterns AND values in them. One of them is not to assimilate.

Chinese parents don't do this. Mexican-Americans in Texas don't do this. (Yep, go there, their kids speak standard American English and not Texas Anglo English, like Kinky Friedman and George Bush, respectively an Illinois-born Jew and a Connecticut -born WASP.)

Kids get their values and their speech patterns from their parents, not their peers. Peers reinforce--but only what they get from parents. African-Americans speak with their distinctive accent because they get it from their parents. Those few who don't (like McWhorter) get that from their parents.

You guys are flat out wrong, as is Judith Rich Harris. Admit defeat like a gentleman.

Kids definitely get their speech patterns -- from accent to slang to intonational variation -- from their peers. Slang is obvious: kids choose their peers' slang to fit in rather than sound like the outdated 'rents. Each generation makes up its own to set it apart from the geezers (happenin', mellow out, bodacious, lunchbox, etc.). Intonational stuff too: was the Valley Girl intonation (rising toward the end of a declarative) inculuated by parents or teenage mall girl peers?

Razib's right that this results in language change: once enough kids in a peer group have misheard or mispronounced "maked" (mayked) as "made" (mayed) by deleting only the "k," and the new form gains critical mass in contemporary usage to displace the older form. Lots of irregular forms started out regular ("haved" became "had"). That's why native Esperanto has lots of irregularity -- enough kids who're taught it as a first language either mishear, misprounounce, or reanalyze, and kaboom to the perfectly regular language of their stuffy parents!

As for blacks, their accent comes from trying to fit in w/ "hood culture," whether they're from there or not (ditto for whites who talk that way, much to the embarrassment of their 'rents). I work w/ plenty of black teenagers from rich DC suburbs, and I've seen their parents -- well off, well dressed, don't speak Ebonics. Their kids look like & act like they're from the ghettos in Southeast DC. Most parents are pressuring their kids to *drop* the ghetto act, to no avail. You also fail to take into account the heritability of personality -- assimilating black parents may pass on genes that would make their kids more assimilating, and vice versa for rebellious parents.

This goes for just about anything that involves imitation or pressure from others -- styles of dress, hairdos, make-up, body modification, tastes in music, movies, tv, etc. Maybe it's just b/c I work w/ kids, but does anyone really believe that where imitation is involved (i.e. not inheritance), kids strive to imitate their dopey parents rather than the cool kids they want to fit in with?

Ah, and howabout "gay" accent? Did their parents speak w/ hissy "s"s and lots of superlatives, or at least praise their gay son when he spoke that way? Some of this could be due to whatever causes homosexuality in an individual, but some is probably also coming from trying to fit in w/ the only peer group that will accept them.

i think this parents vs. peer dialect issue would be more easily debated if we had reference to a graphical representation of the inputs and outputs, as there are obviously various necessary and/or sufficient conditions interlocking here. one sidenote, robin dunbar in grooming and gossip asserts that females upshifting their dialect (classwise) is far more prevelant than males (in reference to their original socioeconomic background), and he attributes this to the reality of hypergamy (women marrying up in polygnynous societies) as far more common than the converse.

I wonder if there is a virtual peer group thing going on with the mass media and all. It does seem like white kids everywhere speak American English the same way (call it standard I suppose) which is of course the way you hear it on television. I lived in Texas for several years and one of the saddest things to me was that no one had a Texas accent. To me this is a sad loss of linguistic diversity so it is nice that some groups are actually holding on to their native speech patterns.

Two random thoughts:

I wonder what would happen if you ran some of these same studies with families that practice home schooling. Schooled children normally exist in a context where the peer to adult ration is twenty to one or more. Even outside of school I would expect that past early childhood they spend more and more time with their friends than their parents. From a basic statistical learning perspective one would expect the children to mimic their piers more than their parents or any adults. But in a home school environment the ration probably hovers around three to one. Even in large home school groups meetings one would expect the ratio to be the same.

I have often wondered when the “natural age” of independence is. I have read that in aboriginal cultures people become net contributors at about age 12. By the mid to late teen years, a persons parents would be pushing mid thirties to forties and statistically you have probably lost at least one. All this adds up to adaptive pressure that would make one less reliant on parents an more on the peers that you need to co-operate with to survive. So in this hypothesis teenage angst is the conflict between evolution signals telling a person to be independent clashing with modern reality that many teenagers are still in the position of children. This is probably all pushed harder by modern nutrition levels signaling children to mature faster.

Diana sez:


Kids get their values and their speech patterns from their parents, not their peers. Peers reinforce--but only what they get from parents. African-Americans speak with their distinctive accent because they get it from their parents. Those few who don't (like McWhorter) get that from their parents.


My Chinese sister-in-law has two boys who were born in Australia.

They don't speak like their parents. They speak English with an Australian accent, and they have Australian attitudes to alcohol and a whole raft of things.

They didn't get these things from their parents, so I don't understand what you are saying.

The concept of a 'peer group' may vary in different cultures. E.g. what is the peer group of a child in a hunter-gatherer society? There are no schools, and probably very few children of closely similar age in the same 'band'. And from a very early age children are trained to imitate their mother or father in the necessary skills of hunting, food-preparation, etc. Modern urban societies are highly 'unnatural' in the way that children spend a lot of time apart from their parents.

Excellent q&a, many thanks. And thanks too for the series of q&a's. Great way to keep the flow flowing around here.

My parents both have thick southern accents. My sister and I grew up in the Midwest, and we moved to Long Island when I was about 12-13. I never had an accent (pure midwestern standard english) My sister picked up a bit of a long Island accent, mainly I think from making fun of it.

Neither of us sounds a bit like rural Mississippi or Mountain Virginia. Accents come from peer culture.

A switch in emphasis here from dialect to gender. If the peer group of a young child is made up entirely of the opposite sex, what might be predicted for that child when he becomes an adolescent? Does peer group override gender identification?

Peer group does not necessarily override gender identification or dialect of parents. I believe its a matter of the perceived advantages and disadvantages of adopting a behavior or identity that determines a child's choices. If parents don't encourage children in a certain direction, they may be more likely to fall in line with their peers. However, if parents teach children the advantages of doing things differently from their peers, then I believe children will adopt the behavior of their parents. In general, children should be exposed to both genders and to a variety of viewpoints. Ultimately, the child's perception of what is most advantageous should ideally determine their choices. Unfortunately, many children are not encouraged to explore options or guided by involved parents and end up accepting the values and interests of their peer groups as a result. What a shame!

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