Children's Use of Semantic Context in Perception of Foreign-Accented Speech

The purpose of this study is to evaluate children's use of semantic context to facilitate foreign-accented word recognition in noise.

Monolingual American English speaking 5- to 7-year-olds (n = 168) repeated either Mandarin- or American English-accented sentences in babble, half of which contained final words that were highly predictable from context. The same final words were presented in the low- and high-predictability sentences.

Word recognition scores were better in the high- than low-predictability contexts. Scores improved with age and were higher for the native than the Mandarin accent. The oldest children saw the greatest benefit from context; however, context benefit was similar regardless of speaker accent.

Despite significant acoustic-phonetic deviations from native norms, young children capitalize on contextual cues when presented with foreign-accented speech. Implications for spoken word recognition in children with speech, language, and hearing differences are discussed.