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Preschoolers are sensitive to accent distance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 August 2019

Drew WEATHERHEAD Open the ORCID record for Drew WEATHERHEAD [Opens in a new window] ,
Ori FRIEDMAN  and
Katherine S. WHITE
Drew WEATHERHEAD*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, BC, Canada
Ori FRIEDMAN
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Katherine S. WHITE
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
*
*Corresponding Author: Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, 2329 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada, V6T 1Z4. E-mail: drew.weatherhead@psych.ubc.ca
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Abstract

Can children tell how different a speaker's accent is from their own? In Experiment 1 (N = 84), four- and five-year-olds heard speakers with different accents and indicated where they thought each speaker lived relative to a reference point on a map that represented their current location. Five-year-olds generally placed speakers with stronger accents (as judged by adults) at more distant locations than speakers with weaker accents. In contrast, four-year-olds did not show differences in where they placed speakers with different accents. In Experiment 2 (N = 56), the same sentences were low-pass filtered so that only prosodic information remained. This time, children judged which of five possible aliens had produced each utterance, given a reference speaker. Children of both ages showed differences in which alien they chose based on accent, and generally rated speakers with foreign accents as more different from their native accent than speakers with regional accents. Together, the findings show that preschoolers perceive accent distance, that children may be sensitive to the distinction between foreign and regional accents, and that preschoolers likely use prosody to differentiate among accents.

Keywords

speech perceptionperceptual distanceaccent judgments
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 46 , Issue 6 , November 2019 , pp. 1058 - 1072
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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