Children Treat Grammatical Errors Differently for Native and Non-Native Speakers

• Published in: Frontiers in psychology Vol. 13; p. 855130
• Main Authors: Rett, Alexandra, White, Katherine S.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Frontiers Media S.A 22.04.2022
• Subjects: accent-based expectations; foreign accents; grammatical errors; Psychology; speaker reliability; speech errors; accent-based expectations; grammatical errors; foreign accents; speaker reliability; speech errors
• ISSN: 1664-1078; 1664-1078
• DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.855130

Both children and adults demonstrate biases against non-native speakers. However, in some situations, adults act more generously towards non-native speakers than towards native speakers. In particular, adults judge errors from non-native speakers less harshly, presumably because they expect such errors. In the present study, we asked whether 5-6-year-old children place less weight on errors from speakers with a foreign accent. In Experiment 1, 5- and 6-year-old children ( N = 80) listened to pairs of either native or foreign-accented speakers (between-subjects) label objects. For native speaker pairings, children preferred information provided by grammatical speakers over information from speakers who made subject-verb agreement errors. In contrast, children chose between foreign-accented speakers at chance. In Experiment 2 ( N = 40), children preferred information from grammatical foreign-accented speakers over information from foreign-accented speakers who produced word-order violations. These findings constitute the first demonstration that children treat speech errors differently based on a speaker’s language background.