The Role of Socio-indexical Information in Regional Accent Perception by Five to Seven Year Old Children

This study examines whether five-seven-year-old children's awareness of regional variation influences their perception of regional phonological variation. It also examines the role exposure to variation plays in the development of perception and awareness in young children. Participants were 66 children aged 5--7 years, all raised in the same town near Philadelphia, USA. The participants included monolingual, bilingual and bi-dialectal children, as well as children speaking a minority ethnolect. A comparison of results from each of these groups provides information on how early exposure to different kinds of social variation influences perception of regional variation at this age.;The first task of the study was an ABX task, testing children's ability to discriminate between accents acoustically, with no reference to accents or geography. The second task was also a discrimination task, but encouraged children to consider the socioindexical meaning of the accents during discrimination, by asking participants to choose the speaker who sounded most similar to their own speech. The stimuli used in these two tasks contrasted the local regional accent of the children's hometown with an unfamiliar regional accent, Southern U.S. English.;The third task of the study was the Awareness Task, which comprised of a series of questions assessing children's awareness about regional variation and their ability to identify the specific accents used in the study.;Responses to the Awareness Task were examined for correlations with the two discrimination tasks. In addition, extensive background data on each subject's language and family residential history was collected and analyzed for effects on their responses to the three experimental tasks.;The results of the study show that 5--7 year old children from all language backgrounds represented in this study reliably discriminate between regional accents of their native language. The Awareness Task indicates that they are forming a general understanding of the social meaning of regional variation: the majority are able to identify the regional accent of their hometown, and half can identify the unfamiliar accent as non-local. Additionally, approximately 40% of subjects correctly attribute the difference between the stimuli speakers to regional variation. The awareness represented by responses to these questions show varying patterns of correlations with responses to the discrimination tasks, depending on the child's native dialect, ethnolect or language.;Taken together, this study shows that regional variation is perceptually salient to five- and six-year-old children and that they are developing the ability to interpret regional variation for social meaning about speakers. Furthermore, language background is shown to not have an effect on the ability to discriminate between accents nor on overall awareness of regional variation in their hometown for children at this age.