Parent or community: Where do 20-month-olds exposed to two accents acquire their representation of words?

Sotaque e telejornalismo: representações de comunicadores de mídia nordestinos

“…The term "my accent", present in this region, refers to the accent of the population of the study, namely the northeastern accent. This term is very close identity and characteristics, confirming the literature that states that different accents serve as social practices that represent qualities associated with certain speakers' communities 3 . So, it may represent the characteristic of a population and its identity 5 .…”

“…It is related only with the pronunciation, different from dialect, which refers to grammar and vocabulary 2 . Different accents behave as social practices whose form and function are important, representing qualities associated with certain speakers' communities 3 . accent variants in Brazil are the ones spoken in the Northeast of the country.…”

Effects of contextual support on preschoolers’ accented speech comprehension

“…A second contribution is that we find detectable processing difficulty for an accent that is present in a sizable minority of our child participants' community. This suggests that findings of better comprehension of community accents (Floccia et al, 2012) may depend on that accent being exhibited by the majority of speakers. A third contribution is that, as mentioned, we find no tendencies to misinterpret accented familiar words as referring to novel objects, a finding that remains to be explored more fully.…”

“…San Diego County has a Spanish-speaking population of 25% (Ryan, 2013), though only 11% (that is, about 40% of the 25%) are estimated to speak English less than "very well" (County of San Diego, 2013), implying among other things the presence of a foreign accent. Presumably some of those who speak "very well" are English-fluent enough to have no identifiable accent, but even the 11% figure suggests that monolingual children in our area are likely to have had incidental PRESCHOOL ACCENT COMPREHENSION exposure to Mexican Spanish accents (see Floccia, Delle Luche, Durrant, Butler, & Goslin, 2012;Howard, Carrazza, & Woodward, 2014, for effects of community accent or language exposure), so if anything, accented-speech comprehension difficulty should be ameliorated. Such limited community exposure is common in a number of major cities or other communities with immigrant populations, and thus represents an important situation for scientific investigation.…”

“…This might be because adaptation happened within a single trial or a small number of trials. Alternatively, children may be to some extent pre-adapted to the Spanish accent via (limited) community exposure (see Floccia et al, 2012, andHoward et al, 2014). Of course, even complete accent adaptation cannot yield perfect comprehension in every circumstance.…”