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ABSTRACT
This study tested the effect of Spanish-accented speech on sentence comprehension in children with different degrees of Spanish experience. The hypothesis was that earlier acquisition of Spanish would be associated with enhanced comprehension of Spanish-accented speech. Three groups of 5–6-year-old children were tested: monolingual English-speaking children, simultaneous Spanish-English bilingual children, and early English-Spanish bilingual children. The children completed a semantic judgment task in English on semantically meaningful and nonsensical sentences produced by a native English speaker and a native Spanish speaker characterized by a strong Spanish accent. All children were slower to respond to foreign accented speech, independent of language background. Monolingual and early bilingual children showed reduced comprehension accuracy of accented speech, but only for nonsensical sentences. Simultaneous bilingual children performed similarly to other groups for meaningful contexts, but were not as strongly affected by accent for nonsensical contexts. Together, the findings suggest that children’s language background has only a minor influence on processing of accented speech.
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to express gratitude to all of the families who participated in the present study, the administrators and the teachers in the Madison Metropolitan school district who generously aided in participant recruitment, and the members of the Language Acquisition and Bilingualism Lab for their invaluable assistance with data collection and data coding.
Disclosure statement
The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the article.
Notes
1 Sentences in the meaningful condition were more likely to have a human subject than those in the nonsensical condition. Items that followed this pattern were answered significantly more correctly (b = 0.90, SE = 0.28, z = 3.15, p < .05), but not significantly faster (b = −124.51, SE = 106.00, t = −1.17, p > .05) than those that did not follow the pattern. However, given that the average stimulus duration was 2,290 ms, and the average RT was 3,394, it is clear that the participants in general waited to respond until about a second after a sentence had played in its entirety. Although the subject of the sentence could be used as an indication of the semantics of the sentence, it is unlikely that the children ceased processing the information after encountering the subject.
2 Beta coefficients represent the log odds difference in accuracy for a one unit increase of the variable. By taking the exponent of the log odds we get the odds difference in accuracy. This difference represents the factor by which the odds of a correct answer increase or decrease with one unit change. For example, to find the log odds difference in the probability from 0.25–0.50, we would convert the probabilities to odds (ODDS = p/1-p) and get .33 and 1. The increase in odds between these two scores is by a factor of 3. This is the odds difference, and by a taking the natural log of 3, we get the log odds difference between these two values which is 1.10.
3 To examine whether there would be adaption to the task, we used trial number as a predictor in a mixed model for accuracy and for RT. We did not find significant changes in accuracy (χ2(1) = 0.02, p = .89) or RT (χ2(1) = 1.43, p = .23) over the course of the task.
4 Seventy percent of the caregivers simultaneous group reported being identified as a non-native speaker based on their accent, while only 2% of the caregivers in the monolingual group and 7% of the caregivers in the early bilingual group reported being identified as a non-native speaker.