Poster #117 - Does This Teacher Deserve an Apple? Exploring the Developmental Roots of Children's Accent-Based Biases

• In Event: 1-061 - Poster Session 02
  In Poster Session: PS 02 Section - Language, Communication

Integrative Statement

Accent-based social biases play a powerful role in young children’s peer preferences. For example, 5- to 6-year-olds living in Boston prefer to be friends with children who speak English with an American accent than a non-native French accent (Kinzler, et al., 2009). At this age, children weigh accents over race – Caucasian children will choose a non-Caucasian child with an American accent over a Caucasian child with a non-native accent. Accent-based preferences have been observed in 5- to 6-year-olds in different populations, including linguistically diverse communities (Byers-Heinlein, et al. 2017). But when and how do accent-based social preferences develop? What factors modulate the strength of accent-based preferences? And do children’s accent-based biases extend beyond friendship preferences? These questions remain largely unanswered.
To test this we presented British 4- to 8-year-olds with four distinct tasks. In the Teacher Selection task children heard two women’s voices and indicated who they would prefer as their teacher. In the Teacher Ability task children indicated how good a teacher they thought each would be. In the Accent Discrimination task children indicated which of the two women spoke more similarly to them. In the Comprehension Task children heard sentences (half of which were embedded in speech-shaped noise to prevent ceiling performance) and repeated them back.
Participants between 4 and 8 years of age were recruited during a summer Science Festival for elementary school-aged children at a large UK university. The study took place in a quiet room, and took approximately 20 minutes to complete. All participants (N=115) were presented with stimuli in Southern British English, which should be familiar to all, and one unfamiliar accent. In Experiment 1 (N=60), children were presented with Korean-accented English, a non-native variety, and in Experiment 2 (N=55) with Canadian-accented English, a regional variety.
In both experiments, four-year-olds were unsuccessful in all tasks, but five-year-olds were able to identify which of the accents was more familiar (see fig. 1). Interestingly, 5-year-olds did not use accent information to guide their teacher preference, or rate the teacher’s ability. Six- to 8-year-olds distinguished British talkers from both Canadian and Korean talkers, and displayed a strong preference for the British-accented talkers in both the Selection and Ability tasks in Experiment 1 – but not Experiment 2. Scoring of the comprehension task is ongoing.
Two aspects of these findings deserve highlighting. First, 5-year-olds succeeded in telling apart British English from both other accents, but failed to use this information to decide who would make a better teacher. This suggests that the ability to tell apart varieties precedes using this information to form social judgements. Second, 6 to 8 year olds treated talkers of unfamiliar regional accents very differently from talkers of non-native varieties. Non-native talkers were judged to be less desirable or competent teachers, unlike regionally-accented talkers. This cannot be explained by an inability to distinguish Canadian and British accents since all children above 5 succeeded in this task. Taken together, these findings underscore the complexity of factors that underlie the development of accent-based social preferences.

Authors

• Helen Buckler, University of Nottingham
  Presenting Author

• Melissa Paquette-Smith, UCLA
  Non-Presenting Author

• Elizabeth K Johnson, University of Toronto Mississauga
  Non-Presenting Author