Cover not available
Part of
Acquiring Sociolinguistic Variation
Edited by Gunther De Vogelaer and Matthias Katerbow
[Studies in Language Variation 20] 2017
► pp. 43–63

Chapter 2
The effects of exposure on awareness and discrimination of regional accents by five- and six year old children

| University of Michigan

This study compares bi-dialectal and mono-dialectal five-and six-year-old children’s sociolinguistic awareness and ability to discriminate regional accents in their native language. Children who regularly hear multiple regional varieties in their input are expected to have better awareness and discrimination accuracy. The children participated in two tasks: an awareness task, assessing their knowledge of regional variation, and a similarity judgment task, assessing their ability to discriminate between speakers based on accents. Results show that both groups reliably discriminate between regional accents, and can identify a local regional accent. However, no advantage is found for either group of participants on either task. The effects of exposure to regional phonological variation on perception and awareness are discussed in light of these findings.

Keywords: Regional accent discrimination, developmental speech perception, acquisition of socio-indexical knowledge, influence of socio-indexical information on speech perception
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.What five to seven year old children know about regional accent
    • 2.1Production of regional varieties
    • 2.2Children’s discrimination of regional variation
    • 2.3Association of regional varieties with social meaning
    • 2.4Description of the Beck (2014) perception study
  • 3.Testing the effect of early exposure to accents on accent discrimination ability
    • 3.1Experiment 1: Awareness Task
      • 3.1.1Methods
        • Participants
        • Materials
        • Procedure
      • 3.1.2Results
      • 3.1.3Conclusion
    • 3.2Experiment 2: Discrimination Task
      • 3.2.1Methods
        • Participants
        • Materials
        • Procedure
      • 3.2.2Results
      • 3.2.3Conclusion
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 30 September 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.20.02bec
References
Bates, Douglas, Martin Maechler, and Ben Bolker
2011 “lme4: Linear Mixed-Effects Models Using S4 Classes: R Package Version 0.999375-42.” Accessed October 8, 2016. [URL].
Beck, Erica Lynn
2014 The Role of Socio-Indexical Information in Regional Accent Perception by Five to Seven Year Old Children. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Michigan.Google Scholar
Butler, Joseph, Caroline Floccia, Jeremy Goslin, and Robin Panneton
2011 “Infants' Discrimination of Familiar and Unfamiliar Accents in Speech.” Infancy 16 (4): 392–417. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clopper, Cynthia G., and David B. Pisoni
2004 “Homebodies and Army Brats: Some Effects of Early Linguistic Experience and Residential History on Dialect Categorization.” Language Variation and Change 16 (1): 31–48. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2004 “Some Acoustic Cues for the Perceptual Categorization of American English Regional Dialects.” Journal of Phonetics 32 (1): 111–140. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clopper, Cynthia G., Kristin L. Rohrbeck, and Laura Wagner
2012 “Perception of Dialect Variation by Young Adults with High-Functioning Autism.” Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 42 (5): 740–754. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cremona, Christiana, and Elizabeth Bates
1977 “The Development of Attitudes towards Dialect in Italian Children.” Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 6 (3): 223–232.Google Scholar
Cristia, Alejandrina, Amanda Seidl, Charlotte Vaughn, Rachel Schmale, Ann Bradlow, and Carolina Floccia
2012 “Linguistic Processing of Accented Speech across the Lifespan.” Frontiers in Psychology 3: 479. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Egerova, Natalia
2010 Neural Correlates of Diaect Perception in 5-Month-Old Infants: A Near Infrared Spectroscopy Study. Master's Degree Dissertation, University of Groningen.Google Scholar
Floccia, Caroline, Joseph Butler, Frédérique Girard et Jeremy Goslin
2009 “Categorization of Regional and Foreign Accent in 5- to 7-Year-Old British Children.” International Journal of Behavioral Development 33 (4): 366–375. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Foulkes, Paul, and Gerard J. Docherty
2006 “The Social Life of Phonetics and Phonology.” Journal of Phonetics 34 (4): 409–438. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Foulkes, Paul, and Gerard J. Docherty, and Dominic Watt
2005 “Phonological Variation in Child Directed Speech.” Language 81 (1): 177–206. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Girard, Frédérique, Caroline Floccia, and Jeremy Goslin
2008 “Perception and Awareness of Accents in Young Children.” British Journal of Developmental Psychology 26 (3): 409–433. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kerswill, Paul, and Ann Williams
2000 “Creating a New Town Koine: Children and Language Change in Milton Keynes.” Language in Society 29 (1): 65–115. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kinzler, Katherine D., and Jasmine M. DeJesus
2013 “Northern = Smart and Southern = Nice: The Development of Accent Attitudes in the United States.” The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 66 (6): 1146–1158. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kitamura, Christine, Robin Panneton, Anna Notley, and Catherine Best
2006 “Aussie-Aussie-Aussie, Oi-Oi-Oi: Infants Love an Australian Accent.” The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 120 (5): 3135. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Labov, William
1998 “The Three English Dialects.” In Handbok of dialects and language variation, ed. by Michael D. Linn, 39–81. San Diego: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Labov, William, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg
2006 Atlas of North American English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Millar, Sharon
2003 “Children and Linguistic Normativity.” In Social Dialectology: In Honor of Peter Trudgill, ed. by David Britan, and Jenny Cheshire, 287–297. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Munson, Benjamin
2010 “Levels of Phonological Abstraction and Knowledge of Socially Motivated Speech-Sound Variation: A Review, a Proposal and a Commentary on the Papers by Clopper, Pierrehumbert, and Tamati; Drager, Foulkes; Mack; and Smith, Hall and Munson.” Laboratory Phonology 1 (1): 157–177. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nazzi, Thierry, Peter W. Jusczyk, and Elizabeth K. Johnson
2000 “Language Discrimination by English-Learning 5-Month-Olds: Effects of Rhythm and Familiarity.” Journal of Memory and Language 43 (1): 1–19. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Payne, Arvilla
1976 The Aquisition of the Phonological System of a Second Dialect. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Phan, Jennifer, and Derek M. Houston
2008 “Infant Dialect Discrimination.” Research on Spoken Language Processing 29: 316–329.Google Scholar
R Core Development Team
2011 R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.Google Scholar
Roberts, Julie
1997a “Acquisition of Variable Rules: A study of (-t, d) Deletion in Preschool Children.” Journal of Child Language 24 (2): 351–372. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1997b “Hitting a Moving Target: Acquisition of Sound Change in Progress by Philadelphia children.” Language Variation and Change 9 (2): 249–266. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2005 “Acquisition of Sociolinguistic Variation.” In Clinical Sociolinguistics, ed. by Martin J. Ball, 151–164. Malden: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Roberts, Julie, and William Labov
1995 “Learning to Talk Philadelphian: Acquisition of Short A by Preschool Children.” Language Variation and Change 7 (1): 101–112. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schneider, Edgar W.
2008 Varieties of English 2: The Americas and the Carribean. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Smith, Jennifer, Mercedes Durham, and Hazel Richards
2013 “The Social and Linguistic in the Acquisition of Sociolinguistic Norms: Caregivers, Children and Variation.” Linguistics 51 (2): 285–324. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Smith, Jennifer, Mercedes Durham, and Liane Fortune
2007 ““Mam, My Trousers is Fa’in Doon!”: Community, Caregiver, and Child in the Acquisition of Variation in a Scottish Dialect.” Language Variation and Change 19 (1): 63–99. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sumner, Meghan, and Arthur G. Samuel
2009 “The Effect of Experience on the Perception and Representation of Dialect Variants.” Journal of Memory and Language 60 (4): 487–501. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wagner, Laura, Cynthia G. Clopper, and John K. Pate
2014 “Children's Perception of Dialect Variation.” Journal of Child Language 41 (5): 1–23. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wells, John C.
1982 Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar