Semantic Specificity in Children’s and Adults’ Word Comprehension Across Accents

• In Event: 3-089 - Children’s navigation of linguistically diverse environments: Accommodating accented speakers

Integrative Statement

In today’s multicultural society, children regularly encounter speech produced by speakers born and raised in linguistic communities that are different from their own. Given that such individuals often speak in a distinct fashion, it is not uncommon for young language learners to be exposed to accent-related variability. This can lead to discrepancies in the realization of words, rendering accented speakers difficult to understand, especially early on in life (e.g., Best et al., 2009; Mulak et al., 2013; Van Heugten et al., 2015). Nonetheless, children are remarkably adept at learning to accommodate accent variation (e.g., Van Heugten & Johnson, 2014; White & Aslin, 2011) and generally succeed at recognizing familiar words in unfamiliar accents long before the preschool period. However, accented speakers typically not only deviate from the local standard in terms of pronunciation variants, but also in terms of lexical selections. This is particularly true for L2 language learners whose linguistic competence in the target language may lag behind that of native speakers, and who, at times, use words that are not fully semantically appropriate (e.g., “tree” when referring to a plant). Here, we ask how children (and adult controls) cope with such lexical alternations in the face of a foreign-accented speaker.

To address this question, monolingual English-speaking 4- to 8-year-olds (N=48) as well as adults (N=48) were tested in a preferential looking procedure. Using a between-subject design, participants either listened to a native English speaker or to a native Mandarin speaker speaking English in a foreign accent. On each trial, two images were presented side-by-side on a screen, and listeners were instructed to look at one of those two images. On match trials, the target word labeled an object that was depicted on the screen (e.g., “Look at the tree!” in the presence of a tree and a house). On mismatch trials, which encompassed 25% of the total number of trials, target words labeled objects that were closely related (but not an exact match) to one of the objects depicted on the screen (e.g., “Look at the tree!” in the presence of a plant and a house). Listeners’ looking behavior after target word onset was examined across accents and trial types.

If listeners are more flexible regarding semantic alternations in the case of an L2 speaker, the difference in target fixations between match and mismatch trials following target word onset should be larger for participants listening to the native-accented speaker than for those listening to the foreign-accented speaker. Unsurprisingly, across all conditions, the proportion of target fixations was found to be higher on match than mismatch trials (all ps < .01). Crucially, however, this effect was greater for the native compared to the accented speaker (p = .015), and this held regardless of age (p = .797, see Figure 1), suggesting that the use of incorrect (but semantically related) labels has more serious ramifications for native- than for foreign-accented speakers. Thus, for children and adults alike, semantic processing is more flexible when the speaker is evidently a second-language learner.

Authors

• Kali Burke, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
  Non-Presenting Author

• Michelle Katharine Tulloch, Florida Atlantic University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Marieke van Heugten, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
  Presenting Author