Effects of contextual support on preschoolers’ accented speech comprehension

Sentence Context Facilitation for Children's and Adults' Recognition of Native- and Nonnative-Accented Speech

“…Thus, although children are more likely to provide a nonword response than adults, they appear to be biased towards reporting known lexical items rather than assuming that the production is an unknown, novel word. This interpretation accords with prior work showing that children do not select novel items when presented with nonnative-accented speech (Creel et al, 2016), unlike when they are presented with native-accented words with mispronunciations (Creel, 2012). Support for the idea that adults and children employ similar response strategies also comes from the findings that adults' and children's accuracy scores across items were significantly correlated and that the specific responses given by the two age groups showed substantial overlap, even when accuracy rates differed across the age groups.…”

“…Some evidence suggests that noise can interfere with children's ability to benefit from supportive context compared with adult listeners (Nittrouer & Boothroyd, 1990), whereas other work suggests that children and adults benefit to a similar degree from semantic context (Fallon, Trehub, & Schneider, 2000;Fallon et al, 2002). have more difficulty understanding talkers whose production patterns deviate from home dialect norms (Bent, 2014, in press;Bent & Atagi, 2015Bent & Holt, in press), only two studies have investigated how semantic-contextual information influences children's perception of nonnative speech (Creel, Rojo, & Paullada, 2016;Holt & Bent, 2017). In Creel et al (2016), children between the ages of 3 and 5 years were presented with sensical and nonsensical sentences produced by speakers of California English or Spanish-accented English in either a four-alternative forced-choice task or in a word repetition task.…”

“…have more difficulty understanding talkers whose production patterns deviate from home dialect norms (Bent, 2014, in press;Bent & Atagi, 2015Bent & Holt, in press), only two studies have investigated how semantic-contextual information influences children's perception of nonnative speech (Creel, Rojo, & Paullada, 2016;Holt & Bent, 2017). In Creel et al (2016), children between the ages of 3 and 5 years were presented with sensical and nonsensical sentences produced by speakers of California English or Spanish-accented English in either a four-alternative forced-choice task or in a word repetition task. In both tasks, either the whole sentence or only the final word excised from the sentence was presented.…”

“…However, there was not a significant effect of vocabulary scores when the effect of age was partialed out. Prior work on the influence of vocabulary knowledge on the perception of native and nonnative speech and the use of semantic context has also failed to observe an effect of vocabulary size separate from the age effect (Bent, 2014;Creel et al, 2016). These findings suggest that although vocabulary knowledge may certainly play a role in a child's ability to utilize semantic cues during word recognition, there may be other linguistic or cognitive changes during development that underlie the increase in semantic predictability benefit in the early school age years.…”

Developmental sociolinguistics: Children's acquisition of language variation

“…Fifteen-to twenty-month-olds struggle to recognize familiar words spoken in unfamiliar accents (e.g., Best et al, 2009;Van Heugten, Krieger, & Johnson, 2015). And, although 19-month-olds can sometimes adapt to unfamiliar accents (White & Aslin, 2011), school-aged children still struggle with them (e.g., Bent & Atagi, 2015;Creel, Rojo, & Paullado, 2016). If children are so challenged by unfamiliar varieties of their native language in the lab, how might daily exposure to multiple varieties affect language development in the real world?…”