2018 Sun Session A 1000

Sunday, November 4, 2018 | Session A, East Balcony | 10am

Infant word recognition in familiar and unfamiliar accents
M. van Heugten, M. Tulloch

The pronunciation of words can vary greatly between accents. The word dog spoken by an Australian talker, for instance, may sound very similar to the word duck spoken in a North American accent. Such between-accent differences have been claimed to impede infants’ word recognition. In fact, children seemingly do not recognize familiar words in unfamiliar accents until their second year of life (e.g., Best et al., 2009; Mulak et al, 2013; Van Heugten et al., 2015) and it takes another few years for them to reach adult- like performance (Bent, 2014). Although the mechanisms underlying this developmental trajectory have been debated (c.f. Best et al., 2009; Schmale et al., 2012; Van Heugten & Johnson, 2014; White & Aslin, 2011), it is currently unclear what factors might best explain children’s growing ability to contend with accented speakers. This is at least partially due to individual studies testing relatively homogeneous groups of children within narrow age ranges, thereby limiting the variability on potentially important predictor variables.

This study takes a different approach and tests infants’ word recognition in the native and in an unfamiliar accent across a much more variable subject population differing widely in age, vocabulary size, and socioeconomic status. By examining which factor best predicts performance, we can thus gain a better understanding of what drives word recognition in unfamiliar accents.

Recruitment was restricted to typically developing monolingual English-learning children between 8 and 30 months of age. A detailed language and family background questionnaire was administered and parental vocabulary checklists were obtained, allowing us to compute estimates of children’s language input, parental education and income, as well as vocabulary scores.

Using the Preferential Looking Procedure, infants (N=92) were presented with two images side-by-side on a computer screen. Their eye movements were recorded as they listened to sentences instructing them to look at one of the objects (e.g., Look at the shoe!). On half the trials the speaker spoke in the dominant local accent. On the other half of the trials, an unfamiliar Australian accent was used. Speaker accent was blocked and counterbalanced for presentation order.

If infants can recognize words in this task, looks toward the target picture after target word onset should reliably exceed chance level (.50). Indeed, children recognized words both in the native and in the Australian accent (ps < .01; see Figure 1), but a cluster-based permutation test revealed that infants experienced more difficulty doing so with the unfamiliar accent (p = .01). Moreover, infants’ comprehension of native and accented words was predicted by different factors. That is, target fixation after noun onset was best predicted by infants’ productive vocabulary size when listening to the native speaker (β =.254, p = .02), whereas it was best predicted by age when listening to the Australian accent (β = .238, p = .03). This suggests that although knowing more words might help word recognition in the native accent, only time (and hence greater exposure to variability) results in word representations becoming robust to accent-induced variation.

References

Bent, T. (2014). Children’s perception of foreign-accented words. Journal of Child Language, 41(6), 1334–1355.

Best, C. T., Tyler, M. D., Gooding, T. N., Orlando, C. B., & Quann, C. A. (2009). Development of phonological constancy: Toddlers’ perception of native- and Jamaican-accented words. Psychological Science, 20(5), 539–542.

Mulak, K. E., Best, C. T., Tyler, M. D., Kitamura, C., & Irwin, J. R. (2013). Development of phonological constancy: 19-month-olds, but not 15-month-olds, identify words in a non-native regional accent. Child Development, 84(6), 2064–2078.

Schmale, R., Cristia, A., & Seidl, A. (2012). Toddlers recognize words in an unfamiliar accent after brief exposure. Developmental Science, 15(6), 732–738.

Van Heugten, M., & Johnson, E. K. (2014). Learning to contend with accents in infancy: Benefits of brief speaker exposure. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(1), 340–350.

Van Heugten, M., Krieger, D. R., & Johnson, E. K. (2015). The developmental trajectory of toddlers’ comprehension of unfamiliar regional accents. Language Learning and Development, 11(1), 41–65.

White, K. S., & Aslin, R. N. (2011). Adaptation to novel accents by toddlers. Developmental Science, 14(2), 372–384.