Preschoolers benefit from sentential context in familiar- and unfamiliar-accented speech.

ABSTRACT: To learn the meaning of a new word, or to recognize the meaning of a known one, both children and adults benefit from surrounding words, or the sentential context. Most of the evidence from children is based on their accuracy and efficiency when listening to speech in their familiar native accent: they successfully use the words they know to identify other words' referents. Here, we assess how accurately and efficiently 4-year-old children use sentential context to identify referents of known and novel nouns in unfamiliar-accented speech, as compared to familiar-accented speech. In a looking-while-listening task, children showed considerable success in processing unfamiliar-accented speech. Children robustly mapped known nouns produced in an unfamiliar accent to their target referents rath

SUBMITTER: Atik ND 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11333174 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature