TY - JOUR
T1 - Language ability and the familiar talker advantage
T2 - Generalizing to unfamiliar talkers is what matters
AU - Levi, Susannah V.
AU - Harel, Daphna
AU - Schwartz, Richard G.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders Grant 1R03DC009851 to the first author. We would like to thank Gabrielle Alfano, Josh Barocas, Jennifer Bruno, Stephanie Lee, Emma Mack, Alexandra Muratore, Sydney Robert, and Margo Waltz for help with data collection and the children and their families for their participation.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.
PY - 2019/5
Y1 - 2019/5
N2 - Purpose: Previous studies with children and adults have demonstrated a familiar talker advantage-better word recognition for familiar talkers. The goal of the current study was to test whether this phenomenon is modulated by a child’s language ability. Method: Sixty children with a range of language ability were trained to learn the voices of 3 foreign-accented, German- English bilingual talkers and received feedback about their performance. Both before and after this talker voice training, children completed a spoken word recognition task in which they heard consonant-vowel-consonant words mixed with noise that were spoken by the 3 familiarized talkers and by 3 unfamiliar German-English bilinguals. Results: Two findings emerged from this study: First, children with both higher and lower language ability performed similarly on the familiarized talkers. Second, children with higher language scores performed similarly on both the familiarized and unfamiliar talkers, whereas children with lower language scores performed worse on the unfamiliar talkers compared to familiar talkers, suggesting an inability to generalize to novel, unfamiliar talkers who spoke with a similar accent. Discussion: Together, these findings indicate that children with higher language scores are able to generalize knowledge about foreign-accented talkers to help spoken word recognition for novel talkers with the same accent. In contrast, children with lower language skills did not exhibit the same magnitude of generalization. This lack of generalization to similar talkers may mean that children with lower language skills are at a disadvantage in spoken language tasks because they are unable to process speech as well when listening to unfamiliar talkers.
AB - Purpose: Previous studies with children and adults have demonstrated a familiar talker advantage-better word recognition for familiar talkers. The goal of the current study was to test whether this phenomenon is modulated by a child’s language ability. Method: Sixty children with a range of language ability were trained to learn the voices of 3 foreign-accented, German- English bilingual talkers and received feedback about their performance. Both before and after this talker voice training, children completed a spoken word recognition task in which they heard consonant-vowel-consonant words mixed with noise that were spoken by the 3 familiarized talkers and by 3 unfamiliar German-English bilinguals. Results: Two findings emerged from this study: First, children with both higher and lower language ability performed similarly on the familiarized talkers. Second, children with higher language scores performed similarly on both the familiarized and unfamiliar talkers, whereas children with lower language scores performed worse on the unfamiliar talkers compared to familiar talkers, suggesting an inability to generalize to novel, unfamiliar talkers who spoke with a similar accent. Discussion: Together, these findings indicate that children with higher language scores are able to generalize knowledge about foreign-accented talkers to help spoken word recognition for novel talkers with the same accent. In contrast, children with lower language skills did not exhibit the same magnitude of generalization. This lack of generalization to similar talkers may mean that children with lower language skills are at a disadvantage in spoken language tasks because they are unable to process speech as well when listening to unfamiliar talkers.
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U2 - 10.1044/2019_JSLHR-L-18-0160
DO - 10.1044/2019_JSLHR-L-18-0160
M3 - Article
C2 - 31021674
AN - SCOPUS:85066920049
VL - 62
SP - 1436
JO - Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders
JF - Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders
SN - 1092-4388
IS - 5
ER -