Non-native speech processing in children with phonological disorders.

Abstract

This study examined how children with and without phonological disorders (PD) process accented speech spoken by a non-native speaker. Two research questions were asked in this project. First was to compare how children with and without PD perform on accented speech and second was to investigate whether the exposure to the accented speech allows children’s increase in overall performance. Children were aged from 3 to 8 years old who were native English speakers. The task was to identify the final words of low- and high-context sentences spoken by two non-native Chinese speakers. Overall, it is expected that older children perform better than younger children and children perform better on high- than low-context sentences which shows children’s ability to use contextual cues. For the first research question, it is hypothesized that typical children will outperform children with PD when processing accented speech which suggests unstable phonological representation in children with PD. For the second research question, it is hypothesized that children in both groups will benefit when exposed to the accented speech for the second time. However, whether children with PD will require more time to adapt to accented speech compared to typical children is of interest in the discussion.