Infants’ Discrimination of Familiar and Unfamiliar Accents in Speech

Abstract

This study investigates infants' discrimination abilities for familiar and unfamiliar regional English accents. Using a variation of the head-turn preference procedure, 5-month-old infants demonstrated that they were able to distinguish between their own South-West English accent and an unfamiliar Welsh English accent. However, this distinction was not seen when two unfamiliar accents (Welsh English and Scottish English) were presented to the infants, indicating they had not acquired the general ability to distinguish between regional varieties, but only the distinction between their home accent and unfamiliar regional variations. This ability was also confirmed with 7-montholds, challenging recent claims that infants lose their sensitivity to dialects at around that age. Taken together, our results argue in favor of an early sensitivity to the intonation system of languages, and to the early learning of accentspecific intonation and potentially segmental patterns. Implications for the development of accent normalization abilities are discussed.Studies on language discrimination highlight young infants' sensitivity to linguistic rhythm through their ability to distinguish pairs of languages belonging to distinct rhythmic categories (e.g., English [stress-based] versus Japanese [mora-based],

The Development of Language Constancy: Attention to Native Versus Nonnative Accents

“…But, infants have never been tested with a familiar nonnative accent. Other studies used accents unfamiliar to American infants: Australian (Diehl et al., ) and British (Nazzi et al., ) English, and found that 5‐ to 7‐month‐olds detect differences between their own and the unfamiliar regional accents (see also Butler, Floccia, Goslin, & Panneton, ). In the next study, therefore, we tested Australian infants with the regional accent AmE, which is familiar to Australian infants due exposure via media.…”

Accent detection and social cognition: evidence of protracted learning

“…The author's preferred explanation is that listeners may need extended perceptual exposure to – protracted learning of – their own accent patterns in order to recognize deviations from that pattern. However, there have been demonstrations of infants detecting accent changes at 5 months (Butler et al., ; Cristia et al., ; Nazzi et al., ). How does this fit with children aged 5 years having difficulty detecting accents (Floccia et al., ; Girard et al., ; Wagner et al., )?…”

“…Six‐month‐olds prefer to look at a face that has been previously associated with a voice speaking a familiar language or accent, rather than a foreign language or accent (Kinzler et al., ; see also Kinzler, Dupoux et al., ). Of course, infant findings are also explicable in terms of a perceptual familiarity preference (e.g., Mehler et al., ; see also Butler, Floccia, Goslin, & Panneton, ; Cristia et al., ; Nazzi, Jusczyk, & Johnson, ) rather than a social response. To sum up, researchers have reported accent‐based responding in a variety of tasks down to infancy.…”

Intonation Plays a Role in Language Discrimination by Infants

“…Some recent results, however, suggest that infants’ discrimination of languages is not based on categorical rhythm classes per se, but rather on sensitivity to gradient durational differences at the edges of utterances. For instance, reanalyzing data from Butler, Floccia, Goslin, and Panneton (), White, Floccia, Goslin and Butler () found that infants were sensitive to local timing differences, specifically, degree of utterance‐final lengthening when discriminating between dialects of British English. Similarly, adults’ discrimination of languages within the same rhythm class (dialects of the same language) has also been attributed their sensitivity to the degree of phrase‐final lengthening (White, Mattys & Wiget, ).…”