Influences of high-level knowledge and low-level perception in accented-speech processing across development

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We live in an increasingly interconnected world, and as a result, we often interact with speakers who sound different from us--they have different accents. Accent differences can result if two speakers of the same language grew up in different places (California vs. New Zealand), or if two speakers have different native languages (US English vs. Mexican Spanish). Because different accents use different sets of sounds to produce the same language, confusion can result. For instance, if a Spanish-accented speaker reports seeing a "sheep" outside, do they mean a wool-covered mammal or a large ocean-going vessel? This proposal examines two factors that may positively affect accented-speech comprehension in young children and in adults. One factor is perceptual learning, storing new mental representations of how Spanish-accented words sound. For instance, children may learn, at a subconscious level, that Spanish-accented versions of the English "ih" vowel are very acoustically similar to the English "ee" vowel. A second factor is language context, such as hearing an accented word in a semantically-plausible sentence like "We sailed across the ocean in a large _." The potential positive impacts of this project are both scientific and social. Scientifically, the project will increase understanding of perceptual-category learning in children and adults. It will clarify how perceptual learning and high-level knowledge like sentence context jointly influence accented-speech comprehension, which can improve not only human perception, but will suggest potential improvements to how computers recognize speech. The project will also generate a set of high- and low-probability Sentences to study Accent Understanding in Child Experiments (SAUCE). This sentence set will be made publicly available for other scientists to use, accelerating the pace of experimentation in speech comprehension in areas as diverse as accent perception, speech processing in noisy environments, and speech perception with cochlear implants (artificial hearing devices). Spanish-English bilingual researchers, a group who tend to be underrepresented in STEM fields, will be recruited for their language expertise, and will be mentored as they assist in conducting the research, increasing overall scientific participation. Socially speaking, the project will suggest how listeners can best improve their accent comprehension, facilitating communication in schools, workplaces, and the media.