How pronunciation distance impacts word recognition in children and adults.

Tessa Bent,Emma Brown,Lian J. Arzbecker,Kristin J. Van Engen,Laura Liang,Rachael F. Holt,Izabela A. Jamsek

doi:10.1121/10.0008930

Abstract

Although unfamiliar accents can pose word identification challenges for children and adults, few studies have directly compared perception of multiple nonnative and regional accents or quantified how the extent of deviation from the ambient accent impacts word identification accuracy across development. To address these gaps, 5- to 7-year-old children's and adults' word identification accuracy with native (Midland American, British, Scottish), nonnative (German-, Mandarin-, Japanese-accented English) and bilingual (Hindi-English) varieties (one talker per accent) was tested in quiet and noise. Talkers' pronunciation distance from the ambient dialect was quantified at the phoneme level using a Levenshtein algorithm adaptation. Whereas performance was worse on all non-ambient dialects than the ambient one, there were only interactions between talker and age (child vs adult or across age for the children) for a subset of talkers, which did not fall along the native/nonnative divide. Levenshtein distances significantly predicted word recognition accuracy for adults and children in both listening environments with similar impacts in quiet. In noise, children had more difficulty overcoming pronunciations that substantially deviated from ambient dialect norms than adults. Future work should continue investigating how pronunciation distance impacts word recognition accuracy by incorporating distance metrics at other levels of analysis (e.g., phonetic, suprasegmental).

Highlights

From infancy through adolescence, children’s awareness of phonetic variation increases, as do their abilities to recognize words with unfamiliar pronunciations
Word recognition accuracy was analyzed using generalized linear mixed effects models with a logit link function to account for the binomial outcome measure
The results showed the expected main effects of accent, listening environment, and listener age on word recognition accuracy: accuracy was lower for all non-ambient accents than the ambient accent, for the noise-added condition than the quiet condition, and for children than adults

Summary

Introduction

Children’s awareness of phonetic variation increases, as do their abilities to recognize words with unfamiliar pronunciations. Within the first few years of life, they improve in their ability to handle phonetic variation arising from many sources including idiolect, gender, emotion, unfamiliar regional dialects, and nonnative accents (Best et al, 2009; Houston and Jusczyk, 2000; Singh et al, 2004; van Heugten and Johnson, 2012; van Heugten et al, 2015; van Heugten et al, 2018). The ability to process and a)Portions of this work were presented in “Predicting children’s word recognition accuracy with two distance metrics” at the 177th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. May 2019; in “How unfamiliar accents impact children’s and adults’ word recognition” at the European Society for Cognitive Psychology, Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. September 2019; and in “Predicting children’s word recognition accuracy from accent distance metrics” at Acoustics Virtually Everywhere, December 2020

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