Emily Bagan, M.A., CCC-SLP
Doctoral Student
Language Acquisition and Bilingualism (LAB) Laboratory
Communication Sciences and Disorders
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Cross-situational Word Learning Across Accents and Time Scales
Despite ambiguity and variability in naturalistic environments, adults and children demonstrate a remarkable ability to learn words. Cross-situational word learning (CSWL) is a proposed mechanism for learning where individuals track co-occurrence probabilities to resolve word-referent ambiguity. One aspect of everyday linguistic environments – accented speech – has not yet been tested in the context of CSWL. Yet, learners are regularly faced with situations requiring them to learn words from diverse multilingual speakers, who often have accents. In a series of three experiments, we examine how monolingual English-speaking adults learn and retain novel words across native English-accented and Spanish-accented speech and different time scales. We find that adults can retain novel words learned in both the native and the Spanish-accented accent, and that the effects of accented speech on learning are moderated by both the cognitive load of the learning task, and the retention interval. These findings have implications both for models of learning and memory, and for structuring linguistic environments that are most conducive to learning.