Foreign Accent and Toddlers’ Word Learning: The Effect of Phonological Contrast

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• word learning
• accent
• language development
• toddler

Acknowledgments

We particularly thank Allard Jongman and Marios Fourakis for serving as our expert phoneticians.

Notes

¹ One concern is that the word “mehf” would be pronounced more like [mef] than [mɛf], but this was not the case. Spanish has one vowel in the region of [e] - [ɛ], whereas English has two separate ones. While most articles on Spanish phonetics refer to the Spanish vowel as being akin to the English tense vowel [e] (except for being shorter and less diphthongized), this is somewhat variable across accents. Our Spanish speaker’s productions were quite consistent, and were heard as [ɛ] by American adults, suggesting that [ɛ] but not [e] was the shared vowel across her dialect and English. (This matches many listeners’ intuitions that the Spanish determiner “el” sounds like the start of elephant). To ensure that this was the case, we performed an acoustic analysis of the vowels in her productions of “mehf” and compared them to average American women’s F1 and F2 measures (Hillenbrand et al., 1995). Measurements were taken from Praat, setting 5500 as the maximum formant frequency for analysis, with 5 formants and a window length of .025. The values we found corroborate our intuition that in her dialect, the vowel shared with English is [ɛ] rather than [e] (see Table 1).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the NSF [BCS1152109].