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

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

In order to develop mature communication skills, language learners must learn to rapidly adjust to all of the different speaking styles they encounter in everyday life. This is not a trivial task, especially for young children whose cognitive and linguistic capacities have yet to fully mature. For instance, it has been firmly established that children initially experience great difficulty navigating accent variation (e.g., Best et al., 2009). Nonetheless, with time and relevant experience, children overcome this challenge and learn to accommodate accented speakers (Potter & Saffran, 2017; Van Heugten & Johnson, 2014; White & Aslin, 2011). This symposium presents three lines of research aiming to better understand how children learn to process, interpret, and adapt to accented speech.

The first paper explores the role of accent distance on listeners’ ability to contend with pronunciation changes, revealing crucial differences in the way children and adult cope with different degrees of accent deviation. The second paper, also focusing on accent-induced sound changes, demonstrates that children use extra-linguistic information to infer whether particular phonological alternations are characteristic of the speaker’s accent (thus warranting adaptation) or whether they are instead attributable to the local context. The third paper examines the semantic specificity with which children and adults interpret familiar words when faced with an accented speaker. Finally, the discussant will integrate these findings by reflecting on the broader context of early speech perception and by discussing the impact of this work on (theories of) spoken language processing in early childhood.

Sub Unit

• Language, Communication

Chair

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

Discussant

• Jenny R. Saffran, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Individual Presentations

• Accent Distance and Perceptual Adaptation in Toddlers and Adults - Presenting Author: Angela Cooper, University of Toronto; Non-Presenting Author: Caterina Bordignon, University of Toronto; Non-Presenting Author: Elizabeth K Johnson, University of Toronto Mississauga

• Toddlers’ Interpretation of Pronunciation Variation Depends on Context - Presenting Author: Katherine S. White, University of Waterloo; Non-Presenting Author: Olivia Daub, University of Waterloo

• Semantic Specificity in Children’s and Adults’ Word Comprehension Across Accents - Non-Presenting Author: Kali Burke, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York; Non-Presenting Author: Michelle Katharine Tulloch, Florida Atlantic University; Presenting Author: Marieke van Heugten, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York