"No Mummy, it's a b[ɑː]th not a b[æ]th!": The processing of accented speech by monolingual and bilingual children

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• Dr. Bronwen Evans, Speech, Hearing & Phonetic Sciences, Division of Psychology & Language Sciences, UCL
• Wednesday 09 March 2016, 14:00-15:00
• Gisbert Kapp, N521.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr. Philip Weber.

Recent increases in complex international migration patterns have led to increasingly diverse multidialectal and multilingual communities, particularly within large urban centres, such as London. Such complex migration patterns mean that native, monolingual, children are likely to encounter not just different native regional accents but also foreign-accented speech. Children raised bi- or multilingually within these communities will likely be exposed to still more variability; accented speech in their home language, foreign-accented speech and accented speech in their community language (i.e., English).

Being able to deal with accent variation is a fundamental part of developing communicative competence. However, relatively little is known about how children develop the ability to perceive differences between accents and use this knowledge to aid comprehension. Still less is known about how this might be affected by language background. This talk will discuss findings from previous research with monolingual children and present findings from a recent study (Evans et al., 2016; in prep) investigating accent processing in monolingual and bilingual children. Taken together, this research suggests that early exposure to variation in the language environment leads to differences in the processing of sociolinguistic variation in young children.

This talk is part of the Speech Recognition by Synthesis Seminars series.

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• Gisbert Kapp, N521
• Speech Recognition by Synthesis Seminars

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