Children Treat Grammatical Errors Differently for Native and Non-Native Speakers

Area of Science:

• Developmental Psychology
• Linguistics
• Sociolinguistics

Background:

• Adults exhibit biases against non-native speakers but can also show leniency towards their errors.
• This leniency in adults is often attributed to expectations of errors from non-native speakers.
• The developmental trajectory of such biases in children remains less understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether 5-6-year-old children adjust their evaluation of speech errors based on speaker accent.
• To determine if children are more or less critical of errors made by foreign-accented speakers compared to native speakers.

Main Methods:

• Experiment 1: 80 children (5-6 years old) listened to object labels from native or foreign-accented speakers, with some speakers making subject-verb agreement errors.
• Experiment 2: 40 children (5-6 years old) evaluated foreign-accented speakers making either grammatical errors or word-order violations.
• Children's preferences for information from grammatical versus error-producing speakers were assessed.

Main Results:

• In native speaker pairings, children preferred grammatical speakers over those with subject-verb agreement errors.
• When comparing foreign-accented speakers, children chose between grammatical and error-producing speakers at chance in Experiment 1.
• In Experiment 2, children preferred grammatical foreign-accented speakers over those with word-order violations.

Conclusions:

• Children aged 5-6 years demonstrate differential treatment of speech errors based on speaker accent.
• Findings suggest children may be less critical of errors from foreign-accented speakers, similar to adult patterns.
• This study provides the first evidence of children modulating their evaluation of speech errors according to language background.