Word recognition for regional dialects and nonnative accents in children and adults: Influence of psycholinguistic distance

Few studies have directly compared adults' or children's perception of nonnative accents and unfamiliar regional dialects. However, some evidence suggests that nonnative varieties cause greater decrements in intelligibility and processing than unfamiliar native dialects, while metalinguistic awareness for nonnative varieties develops earlier than awareness for regional variants. To directly examine regional and nonnative accent perception, we tested sentence recognition in American-English monolingual 5- to 7-year-old children and adults for three accents: Central Midland (familiar native), Scottish (unfamiliar native), and German (detectable but mild nonnative accent) in quiet and multitalker babble. In quiet, both children and adults showed highly accurate word recognition for all accents. Although children's performance was lower than adults’ in noise, overall word recognition accuracy patterns across accents were similar: accuracy was highest for the Midland talker, followed by the German-accented talker, and poorest for the Scottish talker. These data suggest that the greater decrements for nonnative accents compared to unfamiliar regional dialects previously reported may have arisen from the specific varieties or talkers selected. Although both types of unfamiliar speech can cause listening difficulty in noisy environments, the acoustic-phonetic distance from the home dialect may predict both adults' and children's performance better than native vs. nonnative status.