Children’s perception of native dialects and nonnative accents

Abstract

In quiet listening conditions, school-aged children can have difficulty understanding nonnative-accented speech whereas adults tend to be highly accurate. The addition of noise substantially depresses word recognition accuracy for both groups. Here, these findings are extended to the perception of an unfamiliar native dialect. Children between the ages of 5 and 7 years (n = 90) were presented with HINT-C sentences produced by three female talkers with different accents—American English (midland dialect), British English, and Japanese-accented English—in quiet or in 8-talker babble with a + 4 dB SNR. Results showed highly significant main effects of accent, listening condition (noise, quiet), and age in the expected directions, as well as an interaction between talker accent and listening condition. In quiet, children showed very accurate word recognition for the American and British talkers (97% and 95% correct, respectively) with lower accuracy for the nonnative talker (73% correct). Compared to the quiet condition, performance declined more in the noise-added condition for the British (20% decline) and nonnative talkers (21%) than for the American talker (7%). These results suggest that although school-aged children can understand unfamiliar native dialects, their representations of these dialects may be fragile and highly susceptible to environmental degradation.