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Children's perception of foreign-accented words
1Indiana University - Speech and Hearing Sciences.
Journal of Child Language
|January 16, 2014
Summary
Children struggle with recognizing foreign-accented words, performing worse than adults. Both age and vocabulary size aid children
Area of Science:
- Child language acquisition
- Speech perception
- Phonetics
Background:
- Word recognition in children must overcome significant acoustic-phonetic variability.
- Factors like dialect, age, and gender influence how words are spoken.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how foreign-accented speech affects word recognition in children aged four to seven.
- To compare children's and adults' perception of accented words.
Main Methods:
- Assessed children's and adults' ability to recognize foreign-accented words.
- Compared accuracy rates for native- vs. foreign-accented word perception.
Main Results:
- Children showed lower accuracy than adults in recognizing both native- and foreign-accented words.
- Both age groups were less accurate with foreign-accented words, with similar performance decrements.
- Children's age and lexicon size positively correlated with accurate word recognition.
Conclusions:
- Children's word recognition is susceptible to foreign accents.
- Developmental factors like age and vocabulary are crucial for children to process accented speech effectively.
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