van Heugten, M. 1 & Johnson, E. 2
1 Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, CNRS/EHESS/DEC-ENS
2 University of Toronto
Children have been found to struggle with accent-induced differences in the realization of newly-learned words until after their second birthday (Schmale et al., 2011). Here, we examine whether toddlers, like adults, recognize known words in drastically distinct unfamiliar accents and whether brief accent exposure facilitates word recognition. Using the Preferential Looking Procedure, Canadian-English-learning 28-month-olds in Experiment 1 were presented with pictures of two objects on a TV screen, one of which was named in a Scottish accent (e.g., Look at the cow!). This test phase was preceded by a 2-minute exposure phase featuring either the same Scottish-accented or an Australian-accented speaker. Results showed that the proportion of fixations toward the target pictures following target word onset (.67) reliably exceeded chance level. Surprisingly, this held regardless of whether the preceding story was read in Scottish- or Australian-accented English (p=.838), suggesting that 28-month-olds deal with accent-related variability 'on the fly' when words occur in sentence frames. Experiment 2 subsequently examined whether exposure to the target accent would aid children under more challenging listening conditions. To increase difficulty, Scottish-accented words were presented in isolation. As before, exposure was provided either to the Scottish or to an Australian speaker. Overall target word recognition (.60) was indeed lower than in Experiment 1 (p=.038), but was nonetheless unaffected by the storybook reader (p=.977). In a follow-up experiment, a Canadian-accented storybook reader led to similar levels of word recognition in Scottish-accented English (.57), indicating that toddlers had not simply become more tolerant of acoustic deviation, but rather recognized the target words even without accent exposure. Taken together, this study shows that toddlers recognize known words in unfamiliar regional accents and do so most efficiently when words are presented in sentence frames. By 28 months of age, children thus readily contend with accent variation during spoken word recognition.