Can children identify samples of foreign languages as same or different?

Stockmal, Verna; Muljani, D.; Bond, Ζ. S.

doi:10.1016/0388-0001(94)90002-7

Cited by 9 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Presumably, identification is based on some exposure to that specific language. Human perceptual analysis is so acute that even having had no exposure to a language, naive listeners can distinguish it from other unfamiliar languages when the utterances are only two-seconds in length with an 80% accuracy rate (16).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perceptual features of unknown foreign languages as revealed by multi-dimensional scaling

Stockmal

Muljani²,

Bond³

Proceeding of Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing. ICSLP '96

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Adult listeners are able to discriminate between and often identify spoken samples of languages that are unknown to them. Two studies were designed to explore which perceptual properties inherent within the phonological structure of languages are salient to foreign language listeners.In study one, fifteen subjects were asked to judge whether pairs of spoken foreign language sentences were selected from same or different languages and to explain how they had made the judgement. A multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) was conducted on the subject responses for the 'same language' condition. The resulting map revealed that responses could be characterized along two dimensions: phonologically based psychoacoustic properties and talker specific characteristics. The two dimensions define the distinctiveness of the languages and elicited different perceptual feature relationships in subjects.In study two, this perceptual feature relationship was tested using similarity judgements. Thirty subjects rated similarity on a sevenpoint scale for the same set of sentence pairs that had been judged in study one. MDS analysis revealed that the 'different language' condition yielded a map in which the language proximities closely approximated those which had been derived by focusing on phonological properties. This finding suggests that since analysis of both 'different language' and 'same language' sentence pairs produced similar maps, perceived language similarity among foreign languages depends upon the listeners' salient organizational categories inherent within the phonological structure of language and the talker specific characteristics of voice quality and speech rate.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perceptual features of unknown foreign languages as revealed by multi-dimensional scaling

Stockmal

Muljani²,

Bond³

Proceeding of Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing. ICSLP '96

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“…Studies working with lexically identical stimuli establish a considerably earlier age at which children are able to discriminate languages or accents (Beck, 2014; Jones et al, 2017) than the others. Based on the results from Stockmal, Muljani, and Bond (1994) on foreign languages, we can hypothesize that discrimination should be simpler when tokens from the same speaker are to be matched, but among the studies discussed, only Edwards et al (2014) used bidialectal talkers for recording the stimuli. In addition, it has to be kept in mind that all of these childhood studies worked with a cognitively far more demanding methodology than the infant studies and also on these grounds results are not fully comparable.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children’s emerging ability to discriminate L1-varieties

Kaiser

Kasberger

2018

First Language

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Children in Austria are exposed to a large amount of variation within the German language. Most children grow up with a local dialect, German standard language and 'intermediate' varieties summarized as 'Umgangssprache'. Using an ABX design, this study analyses when Austrian children are able to discriminate native varieties of their L1 German (standard German vs local dialect). The results show children's early ability to register differences and similarities on an across-speaker level when sentences are held constant (i.e. to discriminate translation equivalents in the two varieties) and a later, rather sudden emergence of more abstract categories of the varieties, which encompass different phonological and lexical variables and enable children to match sentences which also differ lexically. In sum, discrimination ability seems to be relatively stable and consistent at the age of 8/9. Other than age, the mother's educational background, language variation at home and the immediate sociolinguistic setting (urban/rural) predict children's discrimination performance.

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“…When children are confronted with only unfamiliar accents or dialects, however, the differences between languages become more difficult to detect ( Floccia et al, 2009 ; Wagner et al, 2014a ). In a study by Stockmal et al (1994) , 4- and 5-year-old children heard pairs of utterances in a variety of non-native languages and were asked to judge whether the two tokens were drawn from the same or different languages. Children struggled with this task and were unable to determine whether two utterances came from the same language unless they were provided with additional cues, such as hearing the identical phrase for both utterances, or hearing both tokens spoken by the same talker.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, the factors influencing children’s language discrimination are not yet well understood, and it is not known if brief experience with a language is enough to change children’s perception of unfamiliar languages. Previous research has found that preschool-aged children do use language and accent information to make inferences about a speaker but has also suggested that they may have difficulty recognizing unfamiliar languages (e.g., Stockmal et al, 1994 ; Kinzler et al, 2007 , 2011 ; Floccia et al, 2009 ; Wagner et al, 2014a , b ). Therefore, given that adults’ ability to identify unknown languages can be improved by even short amounts of experience with that language, does brief exposure to a new language also change children’s perception of that language?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of experience in children’s discrimination of unfamiliar languages

Potter

Saffran

2015

Front. Psychol.

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Five- and six-year-old children (n = 160) participated in three studies designed to explore language discrimination. After an initial exposure period (during which children heard either an unfamiliar language, a familiar language, or music), children performed an ABX discrimination task involving two unfamiliar languages that were either similar (Spanish vs. Italian) or different (Spanish vs. Mandarin). On each trial, participants heard two sentences spoken by two individuals, each spoken in an unfamiliar language. The pair was followed by a third sentence spoken in one of the two languages. Participants were asked to judge whether the third sentence was spoken by the first speaker or the second speaker. Across studies, both the difficulty of the discrimination contrast and the relation between exposure and test materials affected children’s performance. In particular, language discrimination performance was facilitated by an initial exposure to a different unfamiliar language, suggesting that experience can help tune children’s attention to the relevant features of novel languages.

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Can children identify samples of foreign languages as same or different?

Cited by 9 publications

References 11 publications

Perceptual features of unknown foreign languages as revealed by multi-dimensional scaling

Perceptual features of unknown foreign languages as revealed by multi-dimensional scaling

Children’s emerging ability to discriminate L1-varieties

The role of experience in children’s discrimination of unfamiliar languages

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