The effect of an unfamiliar accent on typically developing children’s comprehension of spoken sentences

Abstract

Objective: To investigate whether children’s performance on a sentence comprehension task is affected when sentences are spoken in an unfamiliar accent. Method: Participants were 47 typically developing children living in southern Ireland consisting of a younger group (n = 24) of 4-year-olds and an older group (n = 23) of 6-year-olds. The children completed a sentence comprehension task in which half the instructions were spoken in a familiar accent and half in an unfamiliar accent. Sentences were matched for length and syntactic complexity. Main results: The younger group’s scores were significantly lower when sentences were presented in the unfamiliar accent, but there was no accent effect on comprehension for children in the older group. Conclusions: For young children living in southern Ireland, an unfamiliar accent could reduce their comprehension of spoken language.