Collaborative Research: How Accent Distance Impacts Word Recognition Across the Lifespan

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An increasingly globalized society brings together speakers with many different regional or nonnative accents. These pronunciation differences can pose challenges for successful communication, particularly in children, whose language and cognition are still developing. Indeed, mature perception of speech produced by talkers with unfamiliar dialects and accents does not develop until late adolescence. Understanding how and when these pronunciation differences lead to breakdowns in communication is essential for facilitating communication across people from different cultures, languages, and age groups. This project will result in a better understanding of how specific accent properties and listening situations contribute to children's and adults' ability to communicate across dialects and nonnative accents. This project is expected to markedly increase the understanding of how regional dialect and nonnative accent variation impact children's and adult's word identification by characterizing accent distance within the segmental, suprasegmental, and perceptual domains. Establishing reliable and predictive measures of pronunciation distance is a key to bridging work focusing on adults' and children's perception of specific phoneme contrasts and perception of naturally produced sentences of different dialects and accents. This project will establish a quantitative pronunciation distance metric of accent variation. Segmental, suprasegmental, and perceptual distance from the home dialect (Midland American English) for a wide variety of regional dialects and nonnative accents will be measured. The predictive value of the metrics will be assessed for children's and adults' word recognition accuracy in quiet and in noise. The research provides foundational knowledge for a testable word recognition model of unfamiliar accents at key points across the lifespan. Societal benefits resulting from the research include the recruitment and retention of women and individuals from underrepresented groups into research careers, provision of science education to the general public through community engagement and outreach activities, and the sharing of research products including audio recordings, datasets, and experimental code.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.