Katherine S. White’s research while affiliated with University of Waterloo and other places

While developmental researchers take great care to report on the characteristics of their participants, they rarely report on the characteristics of their experimenter(s). This is surprising, given the real potential for experimenter identity (e.g., gender, race, age, etc.), especially as it relates to children’s identities, to influence children’s behavior in experiments. In the current study, we investigate how experimenter identity (as signaled by language and race cues) influences 3- to 5-year-old children’s (N = 159) behavior in the famous marshmallow task. Results show that experimenter identity indeed influenced children’s wait times in the marshmallow task; specifically, we found that racial mismatch between experimenter and child led to longer wait times, and in an exploratory analysis, we found that this effect was exaggerated by an additional mismatch in accent. We thus reveal a previously overlooked factor that may influence children’s behavior in a delayed gratification task—experimenter identity—and discuss the important implications of these findings for developmental research more broadly.

Young children make inferences about speakers based on their accents. Here, we show that these accent-based inferences are influenced by information about speakers’ geographic backgrounds. In Experiment 1, 4- to 6-year-olds (N = 60) inferred that a speaker would be more likely to have the same cultural preferences as another speaker with the same accent than a speaker with a different accent; in Experiment 2 (N = 90), children made similar inferences about speakers’ friendship preferences. Critically, in both experiments, children were less likely to make accent-based inferences when they were told that the speakers all came from different places (both experiments) or from the same place (Experiment 2). These results suggest that young children’s accent-based inferences hinge on information about geographic background and provide insight into how and why children make accent-based inferences. These findings are also the first to show that young children use accent to infer other people’s social preferences.

Can children tell how different a speaker’s accent is from their own? In Experiment 1 (N = 84), four- and five-year-olds heard speakers with different accents and indicated where they thought each speaker lived relative to a reference point on a map that represented their current location. Five-year-olds generally placed speakers with stronger accents (as judged by adults) at more distant locations than speakers with weaker accents. In contrast, four year-olds did not show differences in where they placed speakers with different accents. In Experiment 2 (N = 56), the same sentences were low-pass filtered so that only prosodic information remained. This time, children judged which of five possible aliens had produced each utterance, given a reference speaker. Children of both ages showed differences in which alien they chose based on accent, and generally rated speakers with foreign accents as more different from their native accent than speakers with regional accents. Together, the findings show that preschoolers perceive accent distance, that children may be sensitive to the distinction between foreign and regional accents, and that preschoolers likely use prosody to differentiate among accents.

Developmental researchers are well aware that children behave differently around different people. Nevertheless, researchers rarely consider (and report on) who is running their studies. Indeed, in a survey of articles published in the last 3 years in 4 top developmental journals, we find that the vast majority of studies fail to report any information about experimenter identity, despite the fact that child–adult interactions may be strongly influenced by the social inferences that individuals draw from one another. We argue that developmental researchers need to acknowledge how experimenter identity could be acting as an invisible, lurking variable, influencing the outcome and generalizability of studies. We provide simple suggestions for how researchers and journals can begin to address this issue, thereby improving the quality and depth of the work in our field.

Successful word recognition requires that listeners attend to differences that are phonemic in the language while also remaining flexible to the variation introduced by different voices and accents. Previous work has demonstrated that American-English-learning 19-month-olds are able to balance these demands: although one-off one-feature mispronunciations typically disrupt English-learning toddlers’ lexical access, they no longer do after toddlers are exposed to a novel accent in which these changes occur systematically. The flexibility to deal with different types of variation may not be the same for toddlers learning different first languages, however, as language structure shapes early phonological biases. We examined French-learning 19-month-olds’ sensitivity and adaptation to a novel accent that shifted either the standard pronunciation of /a/ from [a] to [ɛ] (Experiment 1) or the standard pronunciation of /p/ from [p] to [t] (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, French-learning toddlers recognized words with /a/ produced as [ɛ], regardless of whether they were previously exposed to an accent that contained this vowel shift or not. In Experiment 2, toddlers did not recognize words with /p/ pronounced as [t] at test unless they were first familiarized with an accent that contained this consonant shift. These findings are consistent with evidence that French-learning toddlers privilege consonants over vowels in lexical processing. Together with previous work, these results demonstrate both differences and similarities in how French- and English-learning children treat variation, in line with their language-specific phonological biases.

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.

Successful word recognition requires that listeners attend to differences that are phonemic in that language while also remaining flexible to the variation introduced by different voices and accents. Previous work has emonstrated that American-English-learning 19-month-olds are able to balance these demands: although one-off one-feature mispronunciations typically disrupt English-learning toddlers’ lexical access, they no longer do after toddlers are exposed to a novel accent in which these changes occur systematically (White & Aslin, 2011; White & Daub, 2021). The flexibility to deal with different types of variation may not be the same for toddlers learning different first languages, however, as language structure shapes early phonological biases. We examined French-learning 19-month-olds’ sensitivity and adaptation to a novel accent that shifted either the standard pronunciation of /a/ from [a] to [E] (Experiment 1) or the standard pronunciation of /p/ from [p] to [t] (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, French-learning toddlers recognized words with /a/ produced as [E], regardless of whether they were previously exposed to an accent that contained this vowel shift or not. In Experiment 2, toddlers did not recognize words with /p/ pronounced as [t] at test unless they were first familiarized with an accent that contained this consonant shift. These findings are consistent with evidence that French-learning toddlers privilege consonants over vowels in lexical processing. Together with previous work, these results demonstrate both differences and similarities in how French- and English-learning children treat variation, in line with their language-specific phonological biases.

In adults, perceptual learning for speech is constrained, such that learning of novel pronunciations is less likely to occur if the (e.g., visual) context indicates that they are transient. However, adults have had a lifetime of experience with the types of cues that signal stable vs. transient speech variation. We ask whether visual context affects toddlers’ learning of a novel speech pattern. Across conditions, 19-month-olds (N = 117) were exposed to familiar words either pronounced typically or in a novel, consonant-shifting accent. During exposure, some toddlers heard the accented pronunciations without a face present; others saw a video of the speaker producing the words with a lollipop against her cheek or in her mouth. Toddlers showed the weakest learning of the accent when the speaker had the lollipop in her mouth, suggesting that they treated the lollipop as the cause of the atypical pronunciations. These results demonstrate that toddlers’ adaptation to a novel speech pattern is influenced by extra-linguistic context.

Within a language, there is considerable variation in the pronunciations of words owing to social factors like age, gender, nationality, and race. In the present study, we investigate whether toddlers link social and linguistic variation during word learning. In Experiment 1, 24- to 26-month-old toddlers were exposed to two talkers whose front vowels differed systematically. One talker trained them on a word-referent mapping. At test, toddlers saw the trained object and a novel object; they heard a single novel label from both talkers. Toddlers responded differently to the label as a function of talker. The following experiments demonstrate that toddlers generalize specific pronunciations across speakers of the same race (Experiment 2), but not across speakers who are simply an unfamiliar race (Experiment 3). They also generalize pronunciations based on previous affiliative behavior (Experiment 4). When affiliative behavior and race are pitted against each other, toddlers' linguistic interpretations are more influenced by affiliative behavior (Experiment 5). These experiments suggest that toddlers attend to and link social and speech variation in their environment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).