Infants’ Discrimination of Familiar and Unfamiliar Accents in Speech

Joseph Butler · Caroline Floccia · Jeremy Goslin · Robin Panneton

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Phonetics and Phonology Research Language Development and Disorders Linguistic Variation and Morphology

Abstract

This study investigates infants' discrimination abilities for familiar and unfamiliar regional English accents. Using a variation of the head-turn preference procedure, 5-month-old infants demonstrated that they were able to distinguish between their own South-West English accent and an unfamiliar Welsh English accent. However, this distinction was not seen when two unfamiliar accents (Welsh English and Scottish English) were presented to the infants, indicating they had not acquired the general ability to distinguish between regional varieties, but only the distinction between their home accent and unfamiliar regional variations. This ability was also confirmed with 7-month-olds, challenging recent claims that infants lose their sensitivity to dialects at around that age. Taken together, our results argue in favor of an early sensitivity to the intonation system of languages, and to the early learning of accent-specific intonation and potentially segmental patterns. Implications for the development of accent normalization abilities are discussed.

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References

1996Statistical Learning by 8-Month-Old Infants 2002Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer 1982Accents of English 1988A precursor of language acquisition in young infants 1995Infants′ Detection of the Sound Patterns of Words in Fluent Speech 1985Four-month-old infants prefer to listen to motherese 1998Language discrimination by newborns: Toward an understanding of the role of rhythm.2007The native language of social cognition

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