CHILDRENS COMPREHENSION OF UNFAMILIAR REGIONAL ACCENTS - A PRELIMINARY INVESTIGATION

The effect of regional accent on children's processing of speech is a theoretically and practically important aspect of phonological develop ment that has been little researched. 48 children from London, aged fo ur and seven years old, were tested on their ability to repeat and def ine single words presented in their own accent and in a Glaswegian acc ent. Results showed that word comprehension was significantly reduced in the Glaswegian condition and that four-year-olds performed less suc cessfully than seven-year-olds. Both groups made similar numbers of le xical misidentifications, but the younger children were more likely to fail to access any word at all. On the repetition task, the younger c hildren showed a different pattern of errors to the older children, th eir productions being apparently more influenced by the phonetics of t he Glaswegian stimuli. It is suggested that such phonetic responses ar e related to the younger children's failure to map the unfamiliar acce nt onto their own phonological representations. It is proposed that th e lexical misidentifications, common to both age groups, are more like ly to be induced by lack of context. The paper concludes with discussi on of implications of these findings for our understanding of how chil dren develop the ability to process unfamiliar regional accents.