Listeners often have trouble identifying other-accented talkers. Some suggest this Other Accent Effect (OAE) occurs only for non-native accents (e.g., Canadian English listeners experience it for Mandarin-accented English, but not Australian English). But the line between native and non-native accents can be difficult to distinguish, and past studies have confounded accent strength with accent type. Thus, we hypothesize that accent strength modulates the OAE. We predict a heavy non-native accent will elicit an OAE, whereas a light one will not. To test this, we presented native Canadian English listeners with voice line-ups of native Canadian English accented, non-native heavy Mandarin-accented, and non-native light Mandarin-accented talkers. Unsurprisingly, listeners performed better with Canadian English talkers than Mandarin-accented talkers. Crucially, listeners performed equally poorly with both heavy and light Mandarin-accented talkers. Thus, we found no evidence for our hypothesis; instead, we observe that even a weak non-native accent can elicit a strong OAE.

Adults are far better at identifying adult talkers than child talkers (e.g., Cooper et al., 2020). Why is this the case? Are child talkers acoustically less distinguishable (e.g., Lee et al., 1999)? Or perhaps adults better identify adult talkers, while children better identify child talkers (e.g., see Anastasi & Rhodes, 2005, for evidence that an own-age advantage exists in face recognition). Here, we test adults (N=72) and 6.5-year-olds (N=71) on a voice identification task featuring single word recordings by 8 children and 8 adults. While all listeners successfully identified all talkers above chance (ps<.05), adults significantly outperformed children with both adult (Madult=0.66 vs. Mchild=0.54; p<.001) and child talkers (Madult=0.64 vs. Mchild=0.57; p<.05). Thus, we find no evidence of an own-age advantage in talker recognition. Rather, we find additional evidence that adults are more skilled than children in voice identification tasks, suggesting that talker recognitions skills take time to fully mature.

Adults are more accurate at identifying own- than other-accented talkers (e.g., Stevenage, 2012). However, no study to date has examined when the Other Accent Effect (OAE) first emerges. Here, we use a voice line-up task to test 6- to 12-year-olds (N=59) on their ability to recognize own- (Canadian English) and other-accented (Japanese- or Mandarin-accented English) talkers. Own-accented talkers (M=0.77) were recognized better than other-accented talkers (M=0.61), p<.005. No effect of age was observed. This indicates the OAE is well-entrenched by 6 years of age. Interestingly, all children tended to evaluate other-accented talkers negatively, but these biases did not predict the strength of the OAE, suggesting that a factor other than social biases drives the effect (Yu et al., 2021). To further understand the underlying mechanisms of the OAE, we are currently testing children in the same line-up task on their ability to recognize Southern American and Australian English talkers.

Child speech deviates from adult speech in predictable ways. Are listeners who routinely interact with children implicitly aware of these systematic deviations, and thereby better at comprehending children? In Experiment 1, we explore this possibility by testing three types of participants with variable experience interacting with children: undergraduates with minimal experience with children (N=48), mothers of young children (N=48), and early childcare educators (N=36). Participants transcribed single-word utterances produced by the same set of children at 2.5-, 4-, and 5.5-years-old. In Experiment 2, mothers (N=50) completed a similar transcription task that featured speech by their own, and another, 2.5-year-old child. Participants performed similarly regardless of their experience with children, while mothers demonstrated a Familiar Talker Advantage with their own child’s speech. Our findings suggest that while experience with children may not facilitate improved comprehension of child speech in general, it may lead to enhanced comprehension of those children in particular.

Previous research has shown that voices of unfamiliar young children are more difficult to differentiate and identify than the voices of adults. In the present study, we examine whether difficulty identifying child voices extends to cases in which those voices are highly familiar. Caregivers (n = 132) of 3.5- to 10-year-old children were presented with voice recordings of their own child amongst gender- and age-matched peers and asked to identify which voice belonged to their child. Although overall accuracy was high, voices of younger children were misidentified more often than voices of older children. In contrast with existing models of familiar voice identification, results suggest that listeners are sensitive to variability in low-level acoustic cues to speaker identity in familiar as well as unfamiliar voice processing.

Listeners struggle to identify talkers with a different accent than their own, a phenomenon known as the Other Accent Effect (OAE). But for reasons that are not well understood, the OAE is not consistently observed in all studies. Comprehension-related processing demands offer one explanation, such that other-accented talkers who are more easily understood are also easier to recognize. Here, we test this hypothesis using a forensic-style voice line-up. We examine native English-speaking adults’ ability to recognize talkers from four accent groups, manipulating comprehension-related processing demands by presenting listeners with predictable sentences and subtitles (low-demand condition), or variable sentences without subtitles (high-demand condition). As predicted, the OAE was only observed for talkers with non-native accents. But crucially, our comprehension manipulation had no impact on talker recognition accuracy of any accent type. We conclude that comprehension ease is likely not a key factor driving the OAE. Other possible explanations are discussed.

Toddlers are notoriously difficult to understand, yet like accented speakers, their productions tend to systematically differfrom adult productions. Thus, we hypothesize that listeners with routine exposure to toddlers (perhaps even toddlersthemselves) should comprehend toddlers best. Three listener groups were tested on their comprehension of toddlersutterances in an eye-tracking study; forty-eight toddlers (Mage= 33 months), sixteen undergraduates with little experiencearound children (Mage= 18 years), and sixteen mothers of young children (Mage=38 years). All listeners looked longerto targets than distractors (p ¡ 0.05), with mothers and undergraduates target fixations significantly greater than toddlers(p ¡ 0.001). Mothers target fixations (78%) did not differ significantly from undergraduates (74%; p = 0.17). Thesepreliminary findings suggest a complex picture regarding the role of experience in comprehending toddlers utterances.Clearly, however, toddlers do not outperform adults in understanding toddlers.

Young childrens speech pronunciations deviate systematically from adult forms. For example, onsets are often simplified(e.g., stop becomes top), unstressed syllables frequently deleted (e.g., spaghetti becomes getti), and certain segments arecommonly replaced with other ones (e.g., rice becomes wice). The current study examined how well adults and a popularautomatic speech recognition system (i.e., Siri) deal with these deviations. The same 12 children were recorded producing32 words in isolation at three ages: 2.5, 3.5, and 5.5 years. 12 adults were also recorded. These recordings were presentedto 48 young adults, 7 mothers, and Siri for transcription. All listeners performed worst with 2.5-year-old productions,and humans outperformed Siri with all ages (p ¡ 0.001). Mothers demonstrated the highest accuracy with 2.5-year-oldproductions (86%). Additionally, Siri made distinctive transcription errors with childrens speech. These errors may reflectthe systems lack of training with young childrens voices.