Toddlers recognize words in an unfamiliar accent after brief exposure

Rachel Schmale · Alejandrina Cristià · Amanda H. Seidl

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Phonetics and Phonology Research Reading and Literacy Development Language Development and Disorders

Abstract

Both subjective impressions and previous research with monolingual listeners suggest that a foreign accent interferes with word recognition in infants, young children, and adults. However, because being exposed to multiple accents is likely to be an everyday occurrence in many societies, it is unexpected that such non-standard pronunciations would significantly impede language processing once the listener has experience with the relevant accent. Indeed, we report that 24-month-olds successfully accommodate an unfamiliar accent in rapid word learning after less than 2 minutes of accent exposure. These results underline the robustness of our speech perception mechanisms, which allow listeners to adapt even in the absence of extensive lexical knowledge and clear known-word referents.

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References

2010Principles of Linguistic Change 1995Foreign Accent, Comprehensibility, and Intelligibility in the Speech of Second Language Learners 1988Children's use of mutual exclusivity to constrain the meanings of words 2000The Discovery of Spoken Language 2007Perceptual adaptation to non-native speech 2000Short-form versions of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories 2004Rapid adaptation to foreign-accented English 2006Picking up speed in understanding: Speech processing efficiency and vocabulary growth across the 2nd year.

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2014Object labeling influences infant phonetic learning and generalization 2016Effects of contextual support on preschoolers’ accented speech comprehension 2017Children's Use of Semantic Context in Perception of Foreign-Accented Speech 2018And then I saw her race: Race-based expectations affect infants’ word processing 2015Toddlers’ Word Recognition in an Unfamiliar Regional Accent: The Role of Local Sentence Context and Prior Accent Exposure

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