Rett Alexandra, White Katherine S
Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, United States.
Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada.
Front Psychol. 2022 Apr 22;13:855130. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.855130. eCollection 2022.
Both children and adults demonstrate biases against non-native speakers. However, in some situations, adults act more generously towards non-native speakers than towards native speakers. In particular, adults judge errors from non-native speakers less harshly, presumably because they expect such errors. In the present study, we asked whether 5-6-year-old children place less weight on errors from speakers with a foreign accent. In Experiment 1, 5- and 6-year-old children ( = 80) listened to pairs of either native or foreign-accented speakers (between-subjects) label objects. For native speaker pairings, children preferred information provided by grammatical speakers over information from speakers who made subject-verb agreement errors. In contrast, children chose between foreign-accented speakers at chance. In Experiment 2 ( = 40), children preferred information from grammatical foreign-accented speakers over information from foreign-accented speakers who produced word-order violations. These findings constitute the first demonstration that children treat speech errors differently based on a speaker's language background.
儿童和成人都表现出对外语非母语者的偏见。然而，在某些情况下，成年人对待非母语者比对待母语者更为宽容。特别是，成年人对非母语者的错误评判不那么严厉，大概是因为他们预料到会有这样的错误。在本研究中，我们探讨了5至6岁的儿童是否会不那么看重带有外国口音者所犯的错误。在实验1中，80名5岁和6岁的儿童（受试者间设计）听了带有本地口音或外国口音的说话者对物体进行命名的配对。对于本地口音的说话者配对，儿童更倾向于语法正确的说话者提供的信息，而不是主谓一致有误的说话者提供的信息。相比之下，对于带有外国口音的说话者配对，儿童是随机选择的。在实验2中（40名儿童），儿童更倾向于语法正确的带有外国口音的说话者提供的信息，而不是语序有误的带有外国口音的说话者提供的信息。这些发现首次证明，儿童会根据说话者的语言背景不同而区别对待言语错误。
