How pronunciation distance impacts word recognition in children and adults.
J Acoust Soc Am
; 150(6): 4103, 2021 12.
Article
en En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-34972309
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).
Texto completo:
1
Bases de datos:
MEDLINE
Asunto principal:
Percepción del Habla
Límite:
Adult
/
Child
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Child, preschool
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Humans
Idioma:
En
Revista:
J Acoust Soc Am
Año:
2021
Tipo del documento:
Article
País de afiliación:
Estados Unidos