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Children's perception of foreign-accented words*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2014

TESSA BENT
TESSA BENT*
Affiliation:
Indiana University – Speech and Hearing Sciences
*
Address for correspondence: Tessa Bent, Indiana University – Speech and Hearing Sciences, 200 S. Jordan Ave., Bloomington, Indiana 47405, United States. e-mail: tbent@indiana.edu
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Abstract

The acoustic-phonetic realizations of words can vary dramatically depending on a variety of within- and across-talker characteristics such as regional dialect, native language, age, and gender. Robust word learning requires that children are able to recognize words amidst this substantial variability. In the current study, perception of foreign-accented words was assessed in four- to seven-year-old children to test how one form of variability influences word recognition in children. Results demonstrated that children had less accurate word recognition than adults for both native- and foreign-accented words. Both adults and children were less accurate at identifying foreign-accented words compared to native-accented words with children and adults showing similar decrements. For children, age and lexicon size contributed to accurate word recognition.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 41 , Issue 6 , November 2014 , pp. 1334 - 1355
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

[*]

I gratefully acknowledge the help of my research assistants – Eriko Atagi, Victoria Cook, Jessica Copperman, Marissa Ganeku,Valentyna Filimonova, Matti Rhodes, and Melissa Tiearney – for help in collecting and analyzing the data; Charles Brandt for writing the software to run the experiment; and the NIH-NIDCD for providing the funding for this work (R21-DC010027).

References

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