ERIC Number: EJ1172520
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2018
Pages: 16
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1547-5441
EISSN: N/A
Foreign Accent and Toddlers' Word Learning: The Effect of Phonological Contrast
Newman, Rochelle S.; Morini, Giovanna; Kozlovsky, Penina; Panza, Sabrina
Language Learning and Development, v14 n2 p97-112 2018
Prior work demonstrated that toddlers can learn words from a speaker with a foreign accent and generalize that learning to the native accent when the accented variation does not cross phoneme boundaries. The current study explores the situation in which a vowel in the foreign accent is produced such that it could be confused with a different intended vowel in the native accent. Children were taught two new word-object pairings by a foreign-accented speaker; when vowels were produced similarly across accents, toddlers aged 32 months successfully accommodated a change in accent between training and test; when a novel word contained a vowel that was more affected by accent, toddlers did not later recognize the words in their native accent. This suggests that toddlers may face added difficulty when learning words from speakers of different accents when there is the potential for phonetic confusion across vowels.
Descriptors: Toddlers, Speech Impairments, Dialects, Pronunciation, Neurological Impairments, Phonology, Native Speakers, Vowels, Phonetics, Phonemes, North American English, Spanish, Monolingualism
Psychology Press. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 325 Chestnut Street Suite 800, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Fax: 215-625-2940; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: National Science Foundation (NSF)
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: BCS1152109