Ethnic categories uniquely structure human social worlds. People readily form stereotypes about these, and other social categories, but it is unclear whether certain dimensions are privileged for making predictions about strangers when information is limited. If humans have been living in culturally-structured groups for much of their evolutionary history, we might expect them to have adaptations for prioritizing ethno-linguistic cues as a basis for making predictions about others. We provide a strong test of this possibility through a series of studies in a field context along the Quechua-Aymara linguistic boundary in the Peruvian Altiplano where the language boundary is not particularly socially meaningful. We find evidence of such psychological priors among children and adults at this site by showing that their age, and the social categories' novelty affect participants' reliance on ethno-linguistic inductive inferences (i.e. one-to-many predictions). Studies 1-3 show that participants make more ethno-linguistic inferences when the social categories are more removed from their real-world context. Additionally, in Study 4 when the category is marked with acoustic cues of language use, young children rely heavily on ethno-linguistic predictions, even though adults do not.

中文翻译：

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民族语言分类的进化先验：来自秘鲁高原的克丘亚 - 艾马拉边界的案例研究。

种族类别独特地构建了人类社会世界。人们很容易对这些以及其他社会类别形成刻板印象，但尚不清楚某些维度是否有特权在信息有限时对陌生人进行预测。如果人类在进化史上的大部分时间里一直生活在文化结构的群体中，我们可能会期望他们能够适应优先考虑民族语言线索作为预测他人的基础。我们通过在秘鲁高原的克丘亚 - 艾马拉语言边界沿线的一系列实地研究，对这种可能性进行了强有力的测试，其中语言边界没有特别的社会意义。我们通过显示他们的年龄、社会类别的新颖性影响参与者对民族语言归纳推理（即一对多预测）的依赖。研究 1-3 表明，当社会类别远离他们的现实世界背景时，参与者会做出更多的民族语言推断。此外，在研究 4 中，当类别标有语言使用的声音线索时，幼儿严重依赖民族语言预测，即使成年人不这样做。