Bilingual Children Shift and Relax Second-Language Phoneme Categorization in Response to Accented L2 and Native L1 Speech Exposure.
Margarethe McDonald, Margarita Kaushanskaya
PMID 37401753WHAT IT FOUND
Bilingual children changed how they heard English stop sounds after brief exposure to accented English or Spanish speech.
Accented English made their English sound categories shift away from Spanish-like. Spanish speech made categories less strict.
Key findings
01After hearing Spanish-accented English, children placed the English voiced/voiceless stop boundary at 32.5 ms, higher than 30.2 ms after native English.
02After native Spanish exposure, children were less strict about English stop categories, shown by a shallower boundary slope than after native English exposure.
03Native Spanish and Spanish-accented English exposure produced similar changes, so English lexical context did not strongly drive adaptation.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The final sample was smaller than recruited because some children were excluded. The children were 6 to 9 years old, so it says nothing about younger or older children. The first exposure was always native English, so order may have affected results. The test speaker was always a different native English speaker, so the study did not measure perception during exposure. The stories were edited to force VOT ranges, which may have sounded unnatural. Only stop consonants and one timing cue were tested, so it does not show how children adapt to other sounds or speech. The outcome was a lab picture-choice task, not speech production, language performance, or therapy response.
Declared interests
The work was funded by NIH NIDCD and NSF. The supplied text does not report a conflict-of-interest statement beyond funding.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that brief exposure to accented English helps children process accented speech better. The accented condition produced an unexpected English-like shift, and the study measured sound categorization in a lab task, not everyday communication.