Bilingual children's social preferences hinge on accent

Children Treat Grammatical Errors Differently for Native and Non-Native Speakers

Both children and adults demonstrate biases against non-native speakers. However, in some situations, adults act more generously towards non-native speakers than towards native speakers. In particular, adults judge errors from non-native speakers less harshly, presumably because they expect such errors. In the present study, we asked whether 5-6-year-old children place less weight on errors from speakers with a foreign accent. In Experiment 1, 5- and 6-year-old children (N = 80) listened to pairs of either native or foreign-accented speakers (between-subjects) label objects. For native speaker pairings, children preferred information provided by grammatical speakers over information from speakers who made subject-verb agreement errors. In contrast, children chose between foreign-accented speakers at chance. In Experiment 2 (N = 40), children preferred information from grammatical foreign-accented speakers over information from foreign-accented speakers who produced word-order violations. These findings constitute the first demonstration that children treat speech errors differently based on a speaker’s language background.

The Other Accent Effect in Talker Recognition: Now You See It, Now You Don't

The existence of the Language Familiarity Effect (LFE), where talkers of a familiar language are easier to identify than talkers of an unfamiliar language, is well-documented and uncontroversial. However, a closely related phenomenon known as the Other Accent Effect (OAE), where accented talkers are more difficult to recognize, is less well understood. There are several possible explanations for why the OAE exists, but to date, little data exist to adjudicate differences between them. Here, we begin to address this issue by directly comparing listeners' recognition of talkers who speak in different types of accents, and by examining both the LFE and OAE in the same set of listeners. Specifically, Canadian English listeners were tested on their ability to recognize talkers within four types of voice line-ups: Canadian English talkers, Australian English talkers, Mandarin-accented English talkers, and Mandarin talkers. We predicted that the OAE would be present for talkers of Mandarin-accented English but not for talkers of Australian English-which is precisely what we observed. We also observed a disconnect between listeners' confidence and performance across different types of accents; that is, listeners performed equally poorly with Mandarin and Mandarin-accented talkers, but they were more confident with their performance with the latter group of talkers. The present findings set the stage for further investigation into the nature of the OAE by exploring a range of potential explanations for the effect, and introducing important implications for forensic scientists' evaluation of ear witness testimony.

Something About the Way You Speak: A Meta-analysis on Children's Linguistic-based Social Preferences

There is growing interest in the role of linguistic cues (accents, dialects, language) in driving children's social preferences. This meta-analysis integrated 131 effect sizes involving 2,680 infants and children from 2 days old to 11 years. Overall, children prefer native-accent, native-dialect, and native-language speakers over non-native counterparts (d = 0.57). Meta-regression highlighted that bilinguals (d = 0.93) do not exhibit less native-speaker preference compared to monolinguals (d = 0.62). Children displayed stronger preferences based on accent (d = 1.04) than dialect (d = 0.44) and language (d = 0.39). Children's cultural background, exposure to non-native speech, age, and preference measure were not significant moderators. The data are discussed in light of several theoretical explanations for when and why children show linguistic-based social preferences.

Language as a Social Cue

Social groups are a pervasive feature of human life. One factor that is often understudied in the literature on person perception and social categorization is language. Yet, someone's language (and accent) provides a tremendous amount of social information to a listener. Disciplines across the social and behavioral sciences-ranging from linguistics to anthropology to economics-have exposed the social significance of language. Less social psychological research has historically focused on language as a vehicle for social grouping. Yet, new approaches in psychology are reversing this trend. This article first reviews evidence, primarily from psycholinguistics, documenting how speech provides social information. Next it turns to developmental psychology, showing how young humans begin to see others' language as conveying social group information. It then explores how the tendency to see language as a social cue has vast implications for people's psychological processes (e.g., psychological essentialism and trust) and also for society, including education and the law.

Neural representation of linguistic feature hierarchy reflects second-language proficiency

Acquiring a new language requires individuals to simultaneously and gradually learn linguistic attributes on multiple levels. Here, we investigated how this learning process changes the neural encoding of natural speech by assessing the encoding of the linguistic feature hierarchy in second-language listeners. Electroencephalography (EEG) signals were recorded from native Mandarin speakers with varied English proficiency and from native English speakers while they listened to audio-stories in English. We measured the temporal response functions (TRFs) for acoustic, phonemic, phonotactic, and semantic features in individual participants and found a main effect of proficiency on linguistic encoding. This effect of second-language proficiency was particularly prominent on the neural encoding of phonemes, showing stronger encoding of “new” phonemic contrasts (i.e., English contrasts that do not exist in Mandarin) with increasing proficiency. Overall, we found that the nonnative listeners with higher proficiency levels had a linguistic feature representation more similar to that of native listeners, which enabled the accurate decoding of language proficiency. This result advances our understanding of the cortical processing of linguistic information in second-language learners and provides an objective measure of language proficiency.

Emblem Gestures Improve Perception and Evaluation of Non-native Speech

Traditionally, much of the attention on the communicative effects of non-native accent has focused on the accent itself rather than how it functions within a more natural context. The present study explores how the bodily context of co-speech emblematic gestures affects perceptual and social evaluation of non-native accent. In two experiments in two different languages, Mandarin and Japanese, we filmed learners performing a short utterance in three different within-subjects conditions: speech alone, culturally familiar gesture, and culturally unfamiliar gesture. Native Mandarin participants watched videos of foreign-accented Mandarin speakers (Experiment 1), and native Japanese participants watched videos of foreign-accented Japanese speakers (Experiment 2). Following each video, native language participants were asked a set of questions targeting speech perception and social impressions of the learners. Results from both experiments demonstrate that familiar—and occasionally unfamiliar—emblems facilitated speech perception and enhanced social evaluations compared to the speech alone baseline. The variability in our findings suggests that gesture may serve varied functions in the perception and evaluation of non-native accent.

Preschoolers are sensitive to accent distance

Can children tell how different a speaker's accent is from their own? In Experiment 1 (N = 84), four- and five-year-olds heard speakers with different accents and indicated where they thought each speaker lived relative to a reference point on a map that represented their current location. Five-year-olds generally placed speakers with stronger accents (as judged by adults) at more distant locations than speakers with weaker accents. In contrast, four-year-olds did not show differences in where they placed speakers with different accents. In Experiment 2 (N = 56), the same sentences were low-pass filtered so that only prosodic information remained. This time, children judged which of five possible aliens had produced each utterance, given a reference speaker. Children of both ages showed differences in which alien they chose based on accent, and generally rated speakers with foreign accents as more different from their native accent than speakers with regional accents. Together, the findings show that preschoolers perceive accent distance, that children may be sensitive to the distinction between foreign and regional accents, and that preschoolers likely use prosody to differentiate among accents.

Developmental sociolinguistics: Children's acquisition of language variation

Developmental sociolinguistics is a rapidly evolving interdisciplinary framework that builds upon theoretical and methodological contributions from multiple disciplines (i.e., sociolinguistics, language acquisition, the speech sciences, developmental psychology, and psycholinguistics). A core assumption of this framework is that language is by its very nature variable, and that much of this variability is informative, as it is (probabilistically) governed by a variety of factors-including linguistic context, social or cultural context, the relationship between speaker and addressee, a language user's geographic origin, and a language user's gender identity. It is becoming increasingly clear that consideration of these factors is absolutely essential to developing realistic and ecologically valid models of language development. Given the central importance of language in our social world, a more complete understanding of early social development will also require a deeper understanding of when and how language variation influences children's social inferences and behavior. As the cross-pollination between formerly disparate fields continues, we anticipate a paradigm shift in the way many language researchers conceptualize the challenge of early acquisition. This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Linguistic Theory Linguistics > Language Acquisition Neuroscience > Development Psychology > Language.

Effect of speaker certainty on novel word learning in monolingual and bilingual children

In the present study, we examined the effect of speaker certainty on word-learning performance in English-speaking monolingual (M _Age = 6.92) and Spanish-English bilingual (M _Age = 7.32) children. No group differences were observed when children learned novel words from a certain speaker. However, bilingual children were more willing to learn novel words from an uncertain speaker than their monolingual peers. These findings indicate that language experience influences how children weigh cues to speaker credibility during learning and suggest that children with more diverse linguistic backgrounds (i.e., bilinguals) are less prone to prioritizing information based on speaker certainty.

Children's accent-based inferences depend on geographic background

Young children make inferences about speakers based on their accents. Here, we show that these accent-based inferences are influenced by information about speakers' geographic backgrounds. In Experiment 1, 4- to 6-year-olds (N = 60) inferred that a speaker would be more likely to have the same cultural preferences as another speaker with the same accent than a speaker with a different accent; in Experiment 2 (N = 90), children made similar inferences about speakers' friendship preferences. Critically, in both experiments, children were less likely to make accent-based inferences when they were told that the speakers all came from different places (both experiments) or from the same place (Experiment 2). These results suggest that young children's accent-based inferences hinge on information about geographic background and provide insight into how and why children make accent-based inferences. These findings are also the first to show that young children use accent to infer other people's social preferences.

Once a French Speaker, Always a French Speaker? Bilingual Children's Thinking About the Stability of Language

Despite early emerging and impressive linguistic abilities, young children demonstrate ostensibly puzzling beliefs about the nature of language. In some circumstances monolingual children even express the belief that an individual's language is more stable than her race. The present research investigated bilingual children's thinking about the relative stability of language and race (Kinzler & Dautel, 2012). Five-to six-year-old bilingual children were asked to judge whether a target child who varied in race (White or Black) and language (English or French) would grow up to be an adult who maintained the target child's race or her language. Similar to many monolingual children, a heterogeneous group of bilingual children on average chose the language-match. Yet French-English bilingual children were relatively more likely to choose the race-match, especially when tested in their non-dominant language. Specific experience with relevant languages, and communicating in a non-dominant language, may contribute to children's developing metalinguistic success and their thinking about social categorization.