Children exhibit preferences for familiar accents early in life. However, they frequently have more difficulty distinguishing between first language (L1) accents than second language (L2) accents in categorization tasks. Few studies have addressed children’s perception of accent strength, or the relation between accent strength and objective measures of pronunciation distance. To address these gaps, 6- and 12-year-olds and adults ranked talkers’ perceived distance from the local accent (i.e., Midland American English). Rankings were compared with objective distance measures. Acoustic and phonetic distance measures were significant predictors of ladder rankings, but there was no evidence that children and adults significantly differed in their sensitivity to accent strength. Levenshtein Distance, a phonetic distance metric, was the strongest predictor of perceptual rankings for both children and adults. As a percept, accent strength has critical implications for social judgments, which determine real world social outcomes for talkers with non-local accents.

中文翻译：

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“他们肯定不是来自这里”：儿童对 L1 和 L2 英语中的口音距离的感知


孩子们在很小的时候就表现出对熟悉口音的偏好。然而，在分类任务中，他们通常更难以区分第一语言 (L1) 口音，而不是第二语言 (L2) 口音。很少有研究探讨儿童对口音强度的感知，或口音强度与发音距离的客观测量之间的关系。为了解决这些差距，6 岁、12 岁的孩子和成年人对说话者与当地口音（即米德兰美式英语）的感知距离进行了排名。将排名与客观距离测量进行比较。声学和语音距离测量是阶梯排名的重要预测因素，但没有证据表明儿童和成人对口音强度的敏感度存在显着差异。编辑距离（Levenshtein Distance）是一种语音距离度量，是儿童和成人感知排名的最强预测指标。作为一种感知，口音强度对社会判断具有至关重要的影响，而社会判断决定了具有非本地口音的说话者在现实世界中的社会结果。