Processing and comprehension of accented speech by monolingual and bilingual children

This study tested the effect of Spanish-accented speech on sentence comprehension in children with different degrees of Spanish experience. The hypothesis was that earlier acquisition of Spanish would be associated with enhanced comprehension of Spanish-accented speech. Three groups of 5-6-year-old children were tested: monolingual English-speaking children, simultaneous Spanish-English bilingual children, and early English-Spanish bilingual children. The children completed a semantic judgment task in English on semantically meaningful and nonsensical sentences produced by a native English speaker and a native Spanish speaker characterized by a strong Spanish accent. All children were slower to respond to foreign accented speech, independent of language background. Monolingual and early bilingual children showed reduced comprehension accuracy of accented speech, but only for nonsensical sentences. Simultaneous bilingual children performed similarly to other groups for meaningful contexts, but were not as strongly affected by accent for nonsensical contexts. Together, the findings suggest that children's language background has only a minor influence on processing of accented speech.