Elsevier

Lingua

Volume 267, February 2022, 103189
Lingua

5–9-year-olds categorisation of regional accents: The role of exposure to variation

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2021.103189Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Primary school children can group together different speakers by their accent.

  • The distinctiveness and familiarity of the accents affect the children’s accuracy.

  • Children with general exposure to regional variation perform better in the task.

  • The results are interpreted in light of an exemplar model of indexical learning.

Abstract

This study investigates primary school children’s ability to categorise speakers based on regional accent variables found in the UK. Thirty-three children (5;7–9;9) in York took part in a task in which they were asked to group speakers according to whether they sounded as though they came from the same place. Results showed that children were much more accurate at grouping together different speakers according to a Yorkshire/Standard Southern British English accent distinction, rather than a Yorkshire/Scottish or a Yorkshire/North East accent distinction. The distinctiveness and the familiarity of the Standard Southern British English accent features can account for this finding. Furthermore, the children’s general exposure to variation was found to predict their accuracy in the task; children with more exposure to regional variation performed better when grouping speakers based on their pronunciation of the same phoneme embedded within the same word. Building on the results of a previous study with preschool children, these results are discussed in line with an exemplar model of indexical learning.

Section snippets

Introduction investigating children’s perception of regional variation

This study investigates primary school children’s ability to categorise speakers based on regional accent variables found in the UK. Tasks with adults have found that they are able to categorise speakers according to broad regional accent distinctions (Clopper and Pisoni, 2004b, Clopper and Pisoni, 2007) with varying levels of success depending on the participants’ level of geographical mobility (Clopper & Pisoni, 2004a) and whether they have had particular experience with the accents in

The acquisition of variation in an exemplar model

As De Vogelaer, Chevrot, Katerbow & Nardy (2017:1) summarise, whilst remaining quite distinct fields of enquiry, there has been a rise in studies ‘bridging the gap between language acquisition and sociolinguistics’. These studies find that children are acquiring aspects of the social indexicality of linguistic variation in their early years. Perception studies such as Jeffries, 2019, Jones et al., 2017 have found that children are developing sociolinguistic competence at the age of 3 or

Participants

Thirty-three primary-school children took part in the study (M age = 7;1; SD = 1.28, range = 5;8–9;9). There was uneven distribution of females and males but no significant difference in the ages of these two groups (twenty-one girls, M age = 7;1, SD = 1.2; twelve boys, M age = 7;5, SD = 1.2).3

Results

Across the whole experiment the children’s mean average score was 64.31% correct answers (SD = 10.10). This was significantly above chance level (50%), t (32) = 7.47, p < .001. The overall results across the sets are presented in the RDI (Raw (data) Description and Inference) plot in Fig. 2, created using the yarrr package (Phillips, 2017) in R. The children performed best in the Yorkshire/SSBE pairing, with a mean of 78.59% correct (SD = 18.01) which was significantly above chance level (50%),

Discussion

While previous studies have found that children from 5-years-old fail to categorise sentences based on a regional accent distinction, the current study shows that with a simpler task, focused on one accent variable at a time, it is possible for children this age to perceive accent differences and categorise speakers accordingly. In the following sections, the results will be discussed in relation to the significant effects of the independent variables, in comparison to findings from previous

Conclusion

The results of the current study find that a combination of familiarity and distinctiveness of regional accent features predict the ability of 5–9-year-old children to group speakers according to their accent. This is in contrast to previous studies which have relied upon the distinctiveness of unfamiliar accents in order to find success in such a task. Using a novel design, the experiment was able to focus on key accent variables and avoid relying on the children’s memory in order for them to

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    This work was supported by an AHRC funded doctoral studentship.

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