Parent or community: where do 20-month-olds exposed to two accents acquire their representation of words? (original) (raw)
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Infants’ Discrimination of Familiar and Unfamiliar Accents in Speech
Infancy, 2011
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-montholds, 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 accentspecific intonation and potentially segmental patterns. Implications for the development of accent normalization abilities are discussed.
Frontiers in Psychology, 2014
Although infants perceptually attune to native vowels and consonants well before 12 months, at 13-15 months, they have difficulty learning to associate novel words that differ by their initial consonant (e.g., BIN and DIN) to their visual referents. However, this difficulty may not apply to all minimal pair novel words. While Canadian English (CE) 15-month-olds failed to respond to a switch from the newly learned word DEET to the novel non-word DOOT, they did notice a switch from DEET to DIT (Curtin et al., 2009). Those authors argued that early word learners capitalize on large phonetic differences, seen in CE DEET-DIT, but not on smaller phonetic differences, as in CE DEET-DOOT. To assess this hypothesis, we tested Australian English (AusE) 15-month-olds, as AusE has a smaller magnitude of phonetic difference in both novel word pairs. Two groups of infants were trained on the novel word DEET and tested on the vowel switches in DIT and DOOT, produced by an AusE female speaker or the same CE female speaker as in Curtin et al. (2009). If the size of the phonetic distinction plays a more central role than native accent experience in early word learning, AusE children should more easily recognize both of the unfamiliar but larger CE vowel switches than the more familiar but smaller AusE ones. The results support our phonetic-magnitude hypothesis: AusE children taught and tested with the CE-accented novel words looked longer to both of the switch test trials (DIT, DOOT) than same test trials (DEET), while those who heard the AusE-accented tokens did not notice either switch. Implications of our findings for models of early word learning are discussed.
Journal of Child Language, 2021
Multi-accent environments offer rich but inconsistent language input, as words are produced differently across accents. The current study examined, in two experiments, whether multi-accent variability affects infants’ ability to learn words and whether toddlers’ prior experience with accents modulates learning. In Experiment 1, two-and-a-half-year-old Norwegian toddlers were exposed, in their kindergarten, twice per day for one week, to a child-friendly audiovisual tablet-based e-book containing four novel pseudowords. Half of the toddlers heard the story in three Norwegian accents, whereas the other half heard it in one Norwegian accent. The results revealed no differences between conditions, suggesting that multi-accent variability did not hinder toddlers’ word learning. In experiment 2, two-and-a-half-year-old Norwegian toddlers were exposed, in their homes, for one week, to the e-book featuring three Norwegian accents. The results revealed overall better learning in toddlers rai...
Developmental Changes in Infants’ Ability to Cope with Dialect Variation in Word Recognition
Infancy, 2010
Toward the end of their first year of life, infants’ overly specified word representations are thought to give way to more abstract ones, which helps them to better cope with variation not relevant to word identity (e.g., voice and affect). This developmental change may help infants process the ambient language more efficiently, thus enabling rapid gains in vocabulary growth. One particular kind of variability that infants must accommodate is that of dialectal accent, because most children will encounter speakers from different regions and backgrounds. In this study, we explored developmental changes in infants’ ability to recognize words in continuous speech by familiarizing them with words spoken by a speaker of their own region (North Midland-American English) or a different region (Southern Ontario Canadian English), and testing them with passages spoken by a speaker of the opposite dialectal accent. Our results demonstrate that 12- but not 9-month-olds readily recognize words in the face of dialectal variation.
The role of accentual pattern in early lexical representation
Journal of Memory and Language, 2004
The interaction between prosodic and segmental aspects of infant representations for speech was explored using the head-turn paradigm, with untrained everyday familiar words and phrases as stimuli. At 11 months English-learning infants, like French infants (Hall e & Boysson-Bardies, 1994), attended significantly longer to a list of familiar lexical items than to a phonetically comparable rare list, but 9-month-olds did not. Reversing the stress pattern of the familiar items failed to block word-form recognition in 11-month-olds, although a time-course analysis showed that it delayed the infant response. Changing the initial consonant of English words did block word recognition while change to the second consonant did not. Time-course analyses of both the English and the original French data showed that altering the consonant of the unaccented syllable delays word-form recognition in both languages while change to the accented syllable has a stronger effect in English than in French.
The pronunciation of a given word can contain considerable phonetic variation both within and between speakers, affects, and accents. For reliable word recognition, children must learn to hear through the variation that does not change a word’s identity, while still discerning variation that does not belong to a given word’s identity. This requires knowledge of phonologically specified word invariants above the level of phonemic specification. Reviewing developmental accounts and empirical evidence, this chapter discusses the emergence of children’s ability to attend to speaker- and accent-independent invariants. We focus particularly on changes between the ages of 7.5-10.5 months, where evidence points to a developing ability to recognize speech across within-speaker and within-group variation, and 14-19 months, where increasing evidence suggests a shift from phonetically to more phonologically specified word forms. We propose a framework that describes the attentional shifts invol...
Perception and awareness of accents in young children
British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 2008
This study examines children's metaphonological awareness for accent-related information in connected speech. In the first experiment, 5-to 6-year-old Frenchspeaking children were asked to discriminate between Southern and Northern accented French in a sentence categorization task. It was found that these children were not able to reliably distinguish between these native variations of their own language, but were able to distinguish between their own accent and a strong foreign accent in Experiment 2. These findings were also replicated using a speaker discrimination task in Experiment 3, where children were asked to detect pairs of speakers sharing the same accent amongst speaker pairs with different accents. Whilst these experiments have shown that 5-to 6-year-old children do not use non-familiar regional accents as a discriminatory cue, they are able to perceive the differences between accents, as demonstrated in the AX task used in Experiment 4. The factors underlying the relative lack of awareness for a regional accent as opposed to a foreign accent in childhood are discussed, especially regarding the amount of exposure and the learnability of both types of accents.
Acoustic distance explains speaker versus accent normalization in infancy
Acoustic/phonetic differences exist in cross-speaker and cross-accent speech. Young infants generally recognize speech across speakers but not across speakers of different accents. We examined how Australian English infants discriminated Dutch vowels produced by two speakers of the same accent, and by two speakers of two different accents. Acoustic analysis showed that the acoustic distance between same-vowel tokens produced by speakers of different accents was larger than between those produced by speakers of the same accent. Infants demonstrated greater difference in looking time to an accent than a speaker change, indicating that they noticed a difference in a vowel produced in a different accent more than one produced by another speaker with the same accent. This supports the hypothesis that acoustic distance underlies the relative ease in handling speaker versus accent variation.