Contending with foreign accent in early word learning*

Abstract

By their second birthday, children are beginning to map meaning to form with relative ease. One challenge for these developing abilities is separating information relevant to word identity (i.e. phonemic information) from irrelevant information (e.g. voice and foreign accent). Nevertheless, little is known about toddlers' abilities to ignore irrelevant phonetic detail when faced with the demanding task of word learning. In an experiment with English-learning toddlers, we examined the impact of foreign accent on word learning. Findings revealed that while toddlers aged 2 ; 6 successfully generalized newly learned words spoken by a Spanish-accented speaker and a native English speaker, success of those aged 2 ; 0 was restricted. Specifically, toddlers aged 2 ; 0 failed to generalize words when trained by the native English speaker and tested by the Spanish-accented speaker. Data suggest that exposure to foreign accent in training may promote generalization of newly learned forms. These findings are considered in the context of developmental changes in early word representations.

Impossible to _gnore: Word-Form Inconsistency Slows Preschool Children's Word-Learning

“…Instead, children reacted to mispronounced newly-learned words as though they were not the words learned during training. This contrasts with the results of Schmale et al (2011), who found that younger children (30 months) readily generalized to an accented word-form. On the face of it, it is puzzling that older children do not show better performance.…”

“…In Experiment 1, children learned words in one accent and were then tested on the original accent and an altered accent. This simulated learning in one accent, followed by generalization to never-before-heard accent-variants (see Schmale et al, 2011, for a related approach). (Note that the term "accent variant" is used here to mean a word form produced in a particular accent, rather than a particular accent such as southeastern U.S.…”

“…White and Aslin (2011) showed that children as young as 19 months may adjust phoneme categories via lexical feedback: dog becoming dag implies that sock will become sack. Schmale, Cristia, and Seidl (2012), in a paradigm similar to Schmale et al (2011), showed that 24-montholds succeeded in cross-accent recognition of a newly learned word when they received exposure to the accent prior to word learning. Thus, young children benefit from even brief accent exposure in comprehending accented words.…”

“…Moreover, recent research suggests that recognition by partial match to a known form may even hold for newly learned words, which one might expect to have more fragile representations (see Stager & Werker, 1997). Schmale, Hollich, and Seidl (2011) found that 30-month-olds generalized a single newly learned word (neech) learned in a familiar (American) accent to a novel (Spanish) accent; that is, they looked more to the paired object when hearing the accented version of the trained word (neech S ) but looked more to a novel object when hearing an untrained accented word (moof S ). This suggests that 30-month-olds recognized the similarity between the never-before-heard Spanish form and the learned American form.…”

Effects of contextual support on preschoolers’ accented speech comprehension

“…By 2.5 years, children no longer need accent exposure for recognizing familiar words (Van Heugten & Johnson, in press) or newly-learned words (Schmale, Hollich, & Seidl, 2011). Interestingly, the children in the Van Heugten and Johnson (in press) study were more successful at recognizing the accented words (that is, they fixated the named picture more robustly) when words were embedded in full-sentence contexts, hinting that at least one sort of context-acoustic-phonetic sentential context-may facilitate accent comprehensions.…”