2024/04/22 by Malachi Henry, Tessa Bent, Rachael F. Holt +1
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Linguistic Variation and Morphology #Multilingual Education and Policy #Phonetics and Phonology Research
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/s0305000924000138
openalex publication_date 2024/04/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
Children exhibit preferences for familiar accents early in life. However, they frequently have more difficulty distinguishing between first language (L1) accents than second language (L2) accents in categorization tasks. Few studies have addressed children's perception of accent strength, or the relation between accent strength and objective measures of pronunciation distance. To address these gaps, 6- and 12-year-olds and adults ranked talkers' perceived distance from the local accent (i.e., Midland American English). Rankings were compared with objective distance measures. Acoustic and phonetic distance measures were significant predictors of ladder rankings, but there was no evidence that children and adults significantly differed in their sensitivity to accent strength. Levenshtein Distance, a phonetic distance metric, was the strongest predictor of perceptual rankings for both children and adults. As a percept, accent strength has critical implications for social judgments, which determine real world social outcomes for talkers with non-local accents.