Perception and awareness of accents in young children

Abstract

This study examines children's metaphonological awareness for accent-related information in connected speech. In the first experiment, 5-to 6-year-old Frenchspeaking children were asked to discriminate between Southern and Northern accented French in a sentence categorization task. It was found that these children were not able to reliably distinguish between these native variations of their own language, but were able to distinguish between their own accent and a strong foreign accent in Experiment 2. These findings were also replicated using a speaker discrimination task in Experiment 3, where children were asked to detect pairs of speakers sharing the same accent amongst speaker pairs with different accents. Whilst these experiments have shown that 5-to 6-year-old children do not use non-familiar regional accents as a discriminatory cue, they are able to perceive the differences between accents, as demonstrated in the AX task used in Experiment 4. The factors underlying the relative lack of awareness for a regional accent as opposed to a foreign accent in childhood are discussed, especially regarding the amount of exposure and the learnability of both types of accents.

Effects of contextual support on preschoolers’ accented speech comprehension

“…This account of course presumes that young children can detect (explicitly or implicitly) that a speaker has an accent, a task that other studies suggest is difficult for 5-year-olds (Floccia, Butler, Girard, & Goslin, 2009;Girard, Floccia, & Goslin, 2008;Wagner, Clopper, & Pate, 2014; though see Kinzler, Dupoux, & Spelke, 2007, for a different account).…”

Effects of Language Background on the Development of Sociolinguistic Awareness: The Perception of Accent Variation in Monolingual and Multilingual 5- to 7-Year-Old Children

“…As noted by Girard et al, (2008;see also Floccia et al, 2009), measures of correct responses do not exclude potential effects of response bias, that is, the possibility that children might over-or underestimate the number of unfamiliar/untrained accented sentences in the categorization task. To assess whether or not children were able to detect the unfamiliar/untrained accent using a bias-free measure, separate measures of sensitivity (A') and bias (B" D ) were computed using signal detection analysis (see Girard et al, 2008;Floccia et al, 2009).…”

“…For example, children aged 5-6 years are able to group talkers according to their accent, but only when the phonological differences between the accents are maximized (Girard et al, 2008;Wagner et al, 2014). That is, they are able to successfully categorize native versus foreignaccented talkers but are unable to reliably tell apart talkers of their own accent and another unfamiliar regional accent where the acoustic-phonetic differences between the talkers are relatively small.…”

“…To assess whether or not children were able to detect the unfamiliar/untrained accent using a bias-free measure, separate measures of sensitivity (A') and bias (B" D ) were computed using signal detection analysis (see Girard et al, 2008;Floccia et al, 2009). Sensitivity (A') was used rather than d' (Grier, 1971) because it does not rely on the strict assumptions of normality and equal variance of signal and noise distributions.…”

Constancy and Variation in Speech: Phonetic Realisation and Abstraction

“…The authors find that bilinguals were better able to categorise talkers in all accent conditions than monolingual speakers. One explanation the authors offer for this finding is that, in addition to exposure to their own native dialect, bilinguals are aided by greater exposure than monolinguals to other sources of variation, such as the less predictable differences that occur in foreign-accented speech (Girard, Floccia and Goslin, 2008). More generally, the authors argue that knowledge of phonetic and social variation is likely emergent with the development of the ability to extract and use patterns of variation to categorise talkers and is highly dependent on linguistic experience.…”