Individual Differences in Children’s Perception of Foreign-Accented Speech: The Role of Temperament

Abstract

Individual differences in children’s speech perception are large and have been partially attributed to differences in executive function (e.g., Lalonde & Holt, 2014), but much unexplained variability remains. Temperament is a potential influence that has been studied in related fields, such as stuttering (Eggers et al., 2010), but has been ignored as a contributing factor in children’s speech perception. We investigated the influence of temperament on individual differences in children’s perception of foreign-accented speech. Eighty-four 5- to 7-year-old monolingual English children were presented with 60 English sentences produced by either a native English or Mandarin talker (Wildcat Corpus; Van Engen et al., 2010) embedded in multi-talker babble at +8 dB SNR. For 30 sentences, the final (target) word was highly predictive from sentence context and for the other 30, it was not; the same final words appeared in both predictability conditions. Temperament was assessed with the very short form of the Children’s Behavior Questionnaire (Putnam & Rothbart, 2006), which was completed by each child’s parent/caregiver. Semantic context was of similar benefit to children in both the native and foreign-accent conditions. Children who scored high on Surgency (scales of positive emotion, reflecting a tendency to enjoy high-intensity activities) had poorer word recognition in both predictability conditions. These results preliminarily suggest that temperament contributes to individual differences in children’s speech perception in that children who desire a high level of activity tend to perform more poorly on difficult speech perception tasks.