even toddlers can understand a foreign accent |
We all know how difficult it can be to understand somebody
who is speaking in a different accent to our own. This is hard enough as an adult at times, but
imagine what it must be like for a child who is just in the process of learning
language and pronunciation. Rachel
Schmale, Alejandrina
Cristia and Amanda
Seidl set out to investigate whether unfamiliar accents completely impede
young children’s word recognition. They
were working on the premise that being exposed to an unfamiliar accent, even
for as short a time as a minute, makes it easier to understand. The idea behind this is that the listener
picks up on patterns in the accent and then ‘maps’ them onto what they
hear. One previous test showed toddlers
a picture of a dog whilst they heard ⁄dæg/ (dag) rather than the expected pronunciation
and, similarly, a picture of a ball whilst they heard ⁄bæl ⁄ (bal). The
toddlers were then found to ‘generalise’ this sound change when it came to
other objects; so, for example, they looked at a sock when hearing /sæk/ (sak)
but, interestingly, not when hearing /sɪk/
(sik) – showing that they had learnt that specific pattern.
However, Schmale, Cristis and Seidl were aware that, in real
life, children are not going to encounter a speaker with a different accent
which only has one specific feature that is unfamiliar; they are much more
likely to hear a foreign accent with many different features from their
own. The researchers wanted to face
toddlers with exposure to a natural accent in the context of fluent speech and
to do this they tested monolingual 2 year olds’ ability to recognise a newly
learned word when it was spoken in a foreign accent. Firstly some of the children listened to a
passage of text, either in their own American English accent or in a Spanish accent.
After that they were tested with names
of objects in the foreign Spanish accent to see if they could identify
them. The researchers tested this by
tracking which objects the children’s eyes looked towards when they heard it
being referred to*. It was found that the children who had been briefly exposed
to the foreign accent beforehand were much more successful in this word
learning task whereas the children who had not been exposed to the foreign
accent were unable to do it. This suggests
that even a few minutes of exposure to a different accent is sufficient to
‘tune’ our ears and help us understand it.
The researchers propose that we adopt two strategies when
faced with an unfamiliar accent.
Firstly, we will shift our sound boundaries to accommodate to another’s
accent – just as the children did in the example of dog and dag above. We will try to take a pattern and impose it
onto other words to help us to understand them.
However, unfortunately, language is more complicated than this! So, secondly, they propose that when listeners
are faced with an accent that seems to differ dramatically from their own, the
linguistic brain will relax its rules about pronunciation and accept a certain
degree of deviation from its norms. They admit that this could lead to
misunderstandings as listeners will not only accept dag for ‘dog’ but may also start
to accept things like beg for ‘peg’ and sit for ‘seat’, leading to lots of
confusion! They also propose the idea
that a speaker’s ability to adapt to a new unfamiliar accent may literally
improve with age – as we get older our vocabulary expands and, therefore, we
have more resources to draw on when faced with a new accent. What is certain is that this is a fascinating
area that needs further investigation.
* This is easier to understand if you view the Youtube video
at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYnaZkMyKtY&feature=youtu.be
----------------------------------
Schmale, Rachel, Cristia, Alejandrina and Seidl, Amanda (2012)
Toddlers recognize words in an unfamiliar accent after brief exposure. Developmental Science 15 (6): 732-738.
doi. 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2012.01175.x
This summary was written by Gemma Stoyle
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