"They sure aren't from around here": Children's perception of accent distance in L1 and L2 varieties of English.

Children exhibit preferences for familiar accents early in life. However, they frequently have more difficulty distinguishing between first language (L1) accents than second language (L2) accents in categorization tasks. Few studies have addressed children's perception of accent strength, or the relation between accent strength and objective measures of pronunciation distance. To address these gaps, 6- and 12-year-olds and adults ranked talkers' perceived distance from the local accent (i.e., Midland American English). Rankings were compared with objective distance measures. Acoustic and phonetic distance measures were significant predictors of ladder rankings, but there was no evidence that children and adults significantly differed in their sensitivity to accent strength. Levenshtein Distance, a phonetic distance metric, was the strongest predictor of perceptual rankings for both children and adults. As a percept, accent strength has critical implications for social judgments, which determine real world social outcomes for talkers with non-local accents.

How pronunciation distance impacts word recognition in children and adults.

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).

Representation of speech variability.

Speech signals provide both linguistic information (e.g., words and sentences) as well as information about the speaker who produced the message (i.e., social-indexical information). Listeners store highly detailed representations of these speech signals, which are simultaneously indexed with linguistic and social category membership. A variety of methodologies-forced-choice categorization, rating, and free classification-have shed light on listeners' cognitive-perceptual representations of the social-indexical information present in the speech signal. Specifically, listeners can accurately identify some talker characteristics, including native language status, approximate age, sex, and gender. Additionally, listeners have sensitivity to other speaker characteristics-such as sexual orientation, regional dialect, native language for non-native speakers, race, and ethnicity-but listeners tend to be less accurate or more variable at categorizing or rating speakers based on these constructs. However, studies have not necessarily incorporated more recent conceptions of these constructs (e.g., separating listeners' perceptions of race vs ethnicity) or speakers who do not fit squarely into specific categories (e.g., for sex perception, intersex individuals; for gender perception, genderqueer speakers; for race perception, multiracial speakers). Additional research on how the intersections of social-indexical categories influence speech perception is also needed. As the field moves forward, scholars from a variety of disciplines should be incorporated into investigations of how listeners' extract and represent facets of personal identity from speech. Further, the impact of these representations on our interactions with one another in contexts outside of the laboratory should continue to be explored. WIREs Cogn Sci 2017, 8:e1434. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1434 This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Language Acquisition Linguistics > Language in Mind and Brain Psychology > Language.