McDonald Margarethe, Gross Megan, Buac Milijana, Batko Michelle, Kaushanskaya Margarita
University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Lang Learn Dev. 2018;14(2):113-129. doi: 10.1080/15475441.2017.1404467. Epub 2017 Dec 19.
This study tested the effect of Spanish-accented speech on sentence comprehension in children with different degrees of Spanish experience. The hypothesis was that earlier acquisition of Spanish would be associated with enhanced comprehension of Spanish-accented speech. Three groups of 5-6 year old children were tested: monolingual English-speaking children, simultaneous Spanish-English bilingual children and early English-Spanish bilingual children. The children completed a semantic judgment task in English on semantically meaningful and nonsensical sentences produced by a native English speaker and a native Spanish speaker characterized by a strong Spanish accent. All children were slower to respond to foreign accented speech, independent of language background. Monolingual and early bilingual children showed reduced comprehension accuracy of accented speech, but only for nonsensical sentences. Simultaneous bilingual children performed similarly to other groups for meaningful contexts, but were not as strongly affected by accent for nonsensical contexts. Together, the findings suggest that children's language background has only a minor influence on processing of accented speech.
本研究测试了带有西班牙口音的语音对具有不同程度西班牙语经验的儿童句子理解的影响。假设是更早习得西班牙语会与对带有西班牙口音语音的理解增强相关。对三组5至6岁的儿童进行了测试：单语英语儿童、同时学习西班牙语和英语的双语儿童以及早期学习英语和西班牙语的双语儿童。这些儿童完成了一项用英语进行的语义判断任务，任务内容是判断由一位带有浓重西班牙口音的以英语为母语者和一位以西班牙语为母语者说出的语义有意义和无意义的句子。所有儿童对带有外国口音的语音反应都较慢，且与语言背景无关。单语儿童和早期双语儿童对口音语音的理解准确率降低，但仅针对无意义的句子。同时学习双语的儿童在有意义的语境中表现与其他组相似，但在无意义的语境中受口音的影响没那么大。总体而言，研究结果表明儿童的语言背景对带有口音语音的处理只有较小影响。
