The development of regional accent discrimination in children: evidence from Spanish / El desarrollo de la discriminación de acentos regionales en niños: evidencia desde el español

Abstract

This study explores children's ability to discriminate between regional accents in Spanish. One hundred and seven Chilean children aged three to seven years old were asked to differentiate whether two sentences were spoken with the same accent or not. Results indicate that the ability to differentiate between regional accents emerges around age five, a result which contradicts previous studies. The discussion analyses possible explanations for this difference, particularly regarding the differences between languages according to how transparent or opaque they are, and the possible impact of those characteristics in the development of regional accent discrimination abilities.

Regional accents modulate perspective in geographical space

“…According to previous literature, 7-year-old British children are able to categorize unfamiliar regional accents as differing from their native accents (Floccia et al, 2009), and 5-year-old Spanish-speaking children discriminate among ten different Spanish regional accents (Arango, 2016). In addition, listeners are able to extract from features of the speaker's voice, implicit contextual knowledge (Lattner & Friederici, 2003).…”