Parent or community: where do 20-month-olds exposed to two accents acquire their representation of words?

The recognition of familiar words was evaluated in 20-month-old children raised in a rhotic accent environment to parents that had either rhotic or non-rhotic accents. Using an Intermodal Preferential Looking task children were presented with familiar objects (e.g. 'bird') named in their rhotic or non-rhotic form. Children were only able to identify familiar words pronounced in a rhotic accent, irrespective of their parents' accent. This suggests that it is the local community rather than parental input that determines accent preference in the early stages of acquisition. Consequences for the architecture of the early lexicon and for models of word learning are discussed.

• Publication year

  2012

• Venue

  Cognition

• Publication date

  2012-07-01

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Linguistics, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.cognition.2012.03.011PMID 22542698
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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