Essentialist views of the social world are widespread and early developing, with key implications for inter‐group relations.

A child watches the shape bias intermodal preferential looking (IPL) video at home. Unlike typically developing children, children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) do not consistently extend labels to objects of the same shape; however, these same children with ASD perform well with IPL videos assessing grammatical knowledge.

Highly detailed episodes of speech signals are represented in listeners’ cognitive systems. From these speech signals, listeners simultaneously extract linguistic information (top, green) with generally high accuracy and social‐indexical information about the speaker (bottom, orange) with varying accuracy. Linguistic and social‐indexical information (dashed arrows) interact during speech perception.