Children's Developing Awareness of Regional Accents

Our findings

Work by Dr Ella Jeffries has found that children from the age of 3 are able to categorise speakers based on their accent. Furthermore, children who were exposed to more variation in their linguistic input (as measured by the local vs. non-local status of their parents) were better at grouping speakers according to phonological regional variables. Leading on from these findings, the following questions need to be addressed:

What next?

In collaboration with Dr Laurel Lawyer, the question of implicit social judgements will be investigated using experimental methods involving measuring children’s neural activity in the form of event-related brain potentials (ERPs), using electroencephalography (EEG), while they take part in an adapted Implicit Association Test.

The answers to these questions will further our awareness of how children’s social judgements about speakers with different accents arise. More broadly, an underlying aim of the research is to demonstrate a need for a public awareness of the messages we send to children, for example through the use of different accents to represent stereotyped characteristics of cartoon characters in television programmes.