ERIC Number: EJ1436385
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2024-Sep
Pages: 10
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1363-755X
EISSN: EISSN-1467-7687
Preschoolers Benefit from Sentential Context in Familiar- and Unfamiliar-Accented Speech
Developmental Science, v27 n5 e13508 2024
To learn the meaning of a new word, or to recognize the meaning of a known one, both children and adults benefit from surrounding words, or the sentential context. Most of the evidence from children is based on their accuracy and efficiency when listening to speech in their familiar native accent: they successfully use the words they know to identify other words' referents. Here, we assess how accurately and efficiently 4-year-old children use sentential context to identify referents of known and novel nouns in unfamiliar-accented speech, as compared to familiar-accented speech. In a looking-while-listening task, children showed considerable success in processing unfamiliar-accented speech. Children robustly mapped known nouns produced in an unfamiliar accent to their target referents rather than novel competitors, and they used informative surrounding verbs (e.g., "You can eat the dax") to identify the referents of both known and novel nouns--although there was a processing cost for unfamiliar-accented speech in some cases. This demonstrates that 4-year-olds successfully and rapidly process unfamiliar-accented speech by recruiting the same strategies available to them in familiar-accented speech, revealing impressive flexibility in word recognition and word learning across diverse linguistic environments.
Descriptors: Preschool Children, Speech Communication, Language Processing, Listening, Dialects, Sentences, Nouns, Verbs
Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2191/en-us
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) (DHHS/NIH)
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: F32HD103448; R01HD083310
Data File: URL: http://osf.io/myhsn