AUTHOR=Rett Alexandra , White Katherine S. 

TITLE=Children Treat Grammatical Errors Differently for Native and Non-Native Speakers

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=13

YEAR=2022

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.855130

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2022.855130

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=<p>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 (<italic>N</italic> = 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 (<italic>N</italic> = 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.</p>