Perceptual adaptation to nonnative speech by school-aged children

Abstract

With training, listeners can improve their understanding of speech in adverse listening conditions, including those stemming from the environment (e.g., competing noise) and the talker (e.g., unfamiliar accents). For example, listeners can increase their ability to understand a specific nonnative talker and, when trained with multiple talkers with the same nonnative accent, can generalize their learning to novel talkers with that accent. The current study extends these findings by investigating children’s perceptual adaptation to nonnative speech. School-aged children can retune specific speech sound category boundaries, but little is known about their abilities to adapt to naturally produced nonnative speech. To assess children’s adaptation to nonnative speech, 6- and 9-year-old children were presented with sentences produced by multiple Mandarin-accented talkers and repeated what they heard (training condition) or were not given training (control condition). A posttest assessed their understanding of se...