Influences of foreign accent on preschoolers’ word recognition and story comprehension

To better understand how talker-specific information influences spoken language processing in different experimental listening tasks, we examined the effect of a foreign accent on preschoolers’ word recognition and story comprehension. In Experiment 1, preschoolers listening to words presented by a native-accented talker recognized significantly more words than did preschoolers listening to words presented by a foreign-accented talker. In Experiment 2, preschoolers listening to a story narrated by a native-accented talker demonstrated significantly lower comprehension accuracy compared to preschoolers listening to a foreign-accented narrator. These findings underscore the importance of the experimental task when examining and making claims about the influence of accent information on young children's spoken language processing.