When it’s not appropriate to adapt: Toddlers’ learning of novel speech patterns is affected by visual information

The Impact of Phonological Biases on Mispronunciation Sensitivity and Novel Accent Adaptation

“…Toddlers in the Accent Group, but not the Control Group, showed no difference in recognition between standard and shifted pronunciations, suggesting that exposure to the shifted pronunciations in the Exposure Phase led toddlers to adapt to this altered pronunciation. Our results extend previous evidence of adaptation to vowel and consonant shifts in toddlers learning English (White & Aslin, 2011;White & Daub, 2021) to toddlers learning French.…”

“…to the shifts (White & Aslin, 2011;White & Daub, 2021). By necessity, some aspects of our study differ from this previous work with English-learning toddlers.…”

“…Importantly, they also recognized new items with the same shift, showing an ability to adapt to and generalize learned changes in the input after only a brief exposure. Using a similar paradigm, White and Daub (2021) found that English-learning toddlers also adapt to a novel accent that shifts a consonant in familiar words (e.g. book-dook).…”

“…If a toddler's native language influences their sensitivity to consonant and vowel changes in familiar words, it may also impact their ability to adapt when these changes are presented as systematic shifts. English-learning toddlers are sensitive to both vowel and consonant mispronunciations in familiar word recognition (Mani & Plunkett, 2007, but with brief exposure can adapt to shifts of both types (White & Aslin, 2011;White & Daub, 2021). French-learning toddlers, on the other hand, have thus far shown evidence of sensitivity to only consonant, but not vowel, mispronunciations during familiar word recognition (Zesiger & Jöhr, 2011).…”

Children Treat Grammatical Errors Differently for Native and Non-Native Speakers

“…Might they "forgive" a child who makes an error in a situation in which they should not be expected to know it? In other words, as children appear to view mouth obstruction as a possible explanation for atypical pronunciations (White and Daub, 2021), do they see certain characteristics of speakers as "explaining away" their errors? And, if they do, would they "forgive" only certain kinds of errors in these cases (those related to the individual's specific or group level characteristics) or would they be overly generous in their forgiveness?…”