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Foreign accents can vary considerably in the degree to which they deviate from the listener's native accent, but little is known about how the relationship between a speaker's accent and a listener's native language phonology mediates adaptation. Using an artificial accent methodology, we addressed this issue by constructing a set of three artificial accents (Near, Far, and Farther), varying in the number and magnitude of pronunciation deviations from standard Canadian English. These accents were presented to toddlers and adults in an eye-tracking task. Regardless of accent type, adults readily adapted to the exposed pronunciation change. Adults exposed to the Farther accent were also more willing to accept novel pronunciation changes. Young toddlers exposed to Far or Farther accents showed no evidence of acquiring the exposed pronunciation change and demonstrated worse word recognition for standard Canadian-accented words. These findings suggest that when a speaker's accent deviates substantially from a young toddler's native accent, this may lead to a significant decrement in their ability to recognize not only an unfamiliar accent but also native-accented speech. Overall, these findings provide a well-controlled test of competing models of accent adaptation and generate multiple hypotheses to be examined in the future using more ecologically valid stimuli.

Purpose: We compare teens' and adults' imitation of sentences with shortened and lengthened voice onset time (VOT), in order to test whether purported age-based advantages in phonetic acquisition may be due to differences in imitative ability. Method: Teens (M[subscript age] = 13, n = 39) and adults (n = 31) completed an explicit imitation and discrimination task on pairs of sentences characterized by canonical and manipulated (shortened or lengthened) VOT. We assessed extent of imitation using two acoustic metrics ([delta]VOT and Proximity), accuracy on the discrimination task, and correlations between imitation and perception. Results: Both age groups modified VOT when imitating stimuli with both lengthened and shortened VOT. Adults, however, showed significantly more lengthening than teens (i.e., higher [delta]VOT), as well as VOT values that were slightly but significantly closer to the target stimulus values (i.e., lower proximity). Both age groups showed above-chance discrimination accuracy, and a significant relationship between individual perception and production performance was found for lengthened-VOT sentences. Conclusions: We found no evidence that teens have a greater imitative ability than adults; in fact, adults showed significantly more imitation based on both acoustic metrics. Both age groups showed robust imitation of VOT manipulations in both directions, in contrast to previous work showing lack of imitation for shortened VOT. Extent of imitation was predicted by individual perceptual performance, but only to a limited degree, underscoring the importance of other factors in explaining individual variation in imitative ability.

Infants struggle to understand familiar words spoken in unfamiliar accents. Here, we examine whether accent exposure facilitates accent-specific adaptation. Two types of pre-exposure were examined: video-based (i.e., listening to pre-recorded stories; Experiment 1) and live interaction (reading books with an experimenter; Experiments 2 and 3). After video-based exposure, Canadian English-learning 15- to 18-month-olds failed to recognize familiar words spoken in an unfamiliar accent. However, after face-to-face interaction with a Mandarin-accented talker, infants showed enhanced recognition for words produced in Mandarin English compared to Australian English. Infants with live exposure to an Australian talker were not similarly facilitated, perhaps due to the lower vocabulary scores of the infants assigned to the Australian exposure condition. Thus, live exposure can facilitate accent adaptation, but this ability is fragile in young infants and is likely influenced by vocabulary size and the specific mapping between the speaker and the listener's phonological system.

Bilingual and monolingual infants differ in how they process linguistic aspects of the speech signal. But do they also differ in how they process non-linguistic aspects of speech, such as who is talking? Here, we addressed this question by testing Canadian monolingual and bilingual 9-month-olds on their ability to learn to identify native Spanish-speaking females in a face-voice matching task. Importantly, neither group was familiar with Spanish prior to participating in the study. In line with our predictions, bilinguals succeeded in learning the face-voice pairings, whereas monolinguals did not. We consider multiple explanations for this finding, including the possibility that simultaneous bilingualism enhances perceptual attentiveness to talker-specific speech cues in infancy (even in unfamiliar languages), and that early bilingualism delays perceptual narrowing to language-specific talker recognition cues. This work represents the first evidence that multilingualism in infancy affects the processing of non-linguistic aspects of the speech signal, such as talker identity.

Language and accent strongly influence the formation of social groups. By five years of age, children already show strong social preferences for peers who speak their native language with a familiar accent (Kinzler, Shutts, DeJesus, & Spelke, 2009). However, little is known about the factors that modulate the strength and direction of children's accent-based group preferences. In three experiments, we examine the development of accent-based friendship preferences in children growing up in Toronto, one of the world's most linguistically and culturally diverse cities. We hypothesized that the speaker's type of accent and the amount of accent exposure children experienced in their everyday lives would modulate their preferences in a friend selection task. Despite literature suggesting that exposure leads to greater acceptance (Allport, 1954), we find no evidence that routine exposure to different accents leads to greater acceptance of unfamiliarly accented speakers. Children still showed strong preferences for peers who spoke with the locally dominant accent, despite growing up in a linguistically diverse community. However, children's preference for Canadian-accented in-group members was stronger when they were paired with non native (Korean-accented) speakers compared to when they were paired with regional (British-accented) speakers. We propose that children's ability to perceptually distinguish between accents may have contributed to this difference. Children showed stronger preferences for in-group members when the difference between accents was easier to perceive. Overall, our findings suggest that although the strength of accent-based social preferences can be modulated by the type of accent, these preferences still persist in the face of significant diversity in children's accent exposure.

Adults recognize talkers better when the talkers speak a familiar language than when they speak an unfamiliar language. This language familiarity effect (LFE) demonstrates the inseparable nature of linguistic and indexical information in adult spoken language processing. Relatively little is known about children's integration of linguistic and indexical information in speech. For example, to date, only one study has explored the LFE in infants. Here, we sought to better understand the maturation of speech processing abilities in infants by replicating this earlier study using a more stringent experimental design (eliminating a potential voice-language confound), a different test population (English- rather than Dutch-learning infants), and a new language pairing (English vs. Polish rather than Dutch vs. Italian or Japanese). Furthermore, we explored the language exposure conditions required for infants to develop an LFE for a formerly unfamiliar language. We hypothesized based on previous studies (including the perceptual narrowing literature) that infants might develop an LFE more readily than would adults. Although our findings replicate those of the earlier study--demonstrating that the LFE is robust in 7.5-month-olds--we found no evidence that infants need less language exposure than do adults to develop an LFE. We concluded that both infants and adults need extensive (potentially live) exposure to an unfamiliar language before talker identification in that language improves. Moreover, our study suggests that the LFE is likely rooted in early emerging phonology rather than shared lexical knowledge and that infants already closely resemble adults in their processing of linguistic and indexical information.

Observations by sociolinguists suggest that when children relocate to a new community, they rapidly learn to imitate their peers, adopting the new local accent faster and more effectively than adults. However, few well-controlled laboratory experiments have been conducted comparing speech or accent imitation across ages. Here, we investigated Canadian English-speaking children's and adults' imitation of three model speakers: a Canadian English talker, an Australian English talker, and a non-native Mandarin English talker who learned English later in life. The speech of all three talkers was manipulated to have elongated voice onset time (VOT) on word initial stop consonants. The dependent measure was how much participants would lengthen their VOTs after exposure to one of the talkers in two paradigms: delayed shadowing (Experiment 1) and immediate shadowing (Experiment 2). We predicted that overall children would show more imitation than adults, particularly when imitating the Canadian English talker, given previous work on children's social preferences. Although we did not observe age differences in either study, when shadowing was immediate, we found that imitation was influenced by the accent of the speaker, but not in the manner we predicted: both age groups imitated the Mandarin-accented model more strongly than the Canadian model. When shadowing was delayed, we observed no evidence of imitation. We discuss our findings in light of other recent work, and conclude that the development of speech imitation is an area ripe for further investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efficient language use involves the capacity to flexibly adjust to varied pronunciations of words. Although children can contend with some accent variability before their second birthday, it is currently unclear when and how this ability reaches its mature state. In a series of five experiments, we examine the developmental trajectory of toddlers’ comprehension of unfamiliar regional accents. Experiments 1 and 2 reveal that Canadian-English-learning 25-month-olds outperform their 20-month-old peers on the recognition of Australian-accented words and that this effect is likely driven by 25-month-olds’ larger vocabulary size. Experiments 3 to 5 subsequently show that 25-month-olds’ recognition of familiar words holds regardless of prior exposure to the speaker or accent. Taken together, these findings suggest that children’s ability to cope with accent variation improves substantially as their vocabulary expands in the second year of life and once it does, children recognize accented words on the fly, even without experience with the accent. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Purpose: To examine the possibility that early signal-to-word form mapping capabilities are robust enough to handle substantial indexical variation in the realization of words. Method: Two groups of 7.5-month-olds were tested with the Headturn Preference Procedure. Half of the infants were exposed to words embedded in passages spoken by their mothers and tested on lists of trained and novel isolated words spoken by their fathers. The other half of the infants were yoked pairs listening to unfamiliar speakers. Results: In the test phase, infants listened longer to trained than to novel words, indicating that they successfully segmented the words from the passages. This result was not modulated by infants' familiarity with the speaker. Conclusions: Under more naturalistic listening conditions, 7.5-month-olds exhibit the ability to recognize words in the face of substantial indexical variation regardless of whether speakers are familiar. This suggests that early word representations are, at least to some extent, independent of the speaker's gender and may reflect sophisticated abstraction capabilities on the part of the infants, which would render extreme episodic models of early speech perception untenable. Additional research using similarly ecologically valid testing methods is called for to elucidate the precise nature of early word representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the decisions held by Justice Donald Bowman that required a foray into the legal relationship, with a focus on court cases in Canada on the existence of a relationship of independent contractor or employee, partnership, or agency. It cites some cases litigated in the Canadian tax courts involving partnership and related tax consequences. It describes cases involving the determination of whether an individual qualifies as an employee under employment insurance legislation.

We report the first investigation of a deep subpermafrost microbial ecosystem, a terrestrial analog for the Martian subsurface. Our multidisciplinary team analyzed fracture water collected at 890 and 1,130 m depths beneath a 540-m-thick permafrost layer at the Lupin Au mine (Nunavut, Canada). 14C, 3H, and noble gas isotope analyses suggest that the Na–Ca–Cl, suboxic, fracture water represents a mixture of geologically ancient brine, ~25-kyr-old, meteoric water and a minor modern talik-water component. Microbial planktonic concentrations were ~103 cells mL−1. Analysis of the 16S rRNA gene from extracted DNA and enrichment cultures revealed 42 unique operational taxonomic units in 11 genera with Desulfosporosinus, Halothiobacillus, and Pseudomonas representing the most prominent phylotypes and failed to detect Archaea. The abundance of terminally branched and midchain-branched saturated fatty acids (5 to 15 mol%) was consistent with the abundance of Gram-positive bacteria in the clone libraries. Geochemical data, the ubiquinone (UQ) abundance (3 to 11 mol%), and the presence of both aerobic and anaerobic bacteria indicated that the environment was suboxic, not anoxic. Stable sulfur isotope analyses of the fracture water detected the presence of microbial sulfate reduction, and analyses of the vein-filling pyrite indicated that it was in isotopic equilibrium with the dissolved sulfide. Free energy calculations revealed that sulfate reduction and sulfide oxidation via denitrification and not methanogenesis were the most thermodynamically viable consistent with the principal metabolisms inferred from the 16S rRNA community composition and with CH4 isotopic compositions. The sulfate-reducing bacteria most likely colonized the subsurface during the Pleistocene or earlier, whereas aerobic bacteria may have entered the fracture water networks either during deglaciation prior to permafrost formation 9,000 years ago or from the nearby talik through the hydrologic gradient created during mine dewatering. Although the absence of methanogens from this subsurface ecosystem is somewhat surprising, it may be attributable to an energy bottleneck that restricts their migration from surface permafrost deposits where they are frequently reported. These results have implications for the biological origin of CH4 on Mars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-border financing techniques have changed over the years as the tax laws have changed to curtail particular forms. However, one form of cross-border financing that has had a relatively long life and continues to endure is the so-called tower structure. The effectiveness of a tower structure depends on the favourable tax treatment of dividends received by an entity in the tower structure. Tax advisers might be expected to provide an opinion that such dividends are deductible pursuant to subsection 112(1) or 113(1) of the Income Tax Act. Unfortunately, if the entity in receipt of a dividend is a "specified financial institution," in certain cases the rules in subsections 112(2.1) and 258(3) may make dividends received on "term preferred shares" non-deductible. The authors argue that shares acquired in a typical tower structure should meet the exception that is provided for dividends on shares that are not acquired in the ordinary course of a taxpayer's business, and that this conclusion is consistent with the language, context, and purpose of the term preferred share rules. The authors examine the history and context of the term preferred share rules, the relevant tax jurisprudence, and the Canada Revenue Agency's historical and recent administrative positions on the scope of the "not acquired in the ordinary course of business" exception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Canadian Tax Journal / Revue Fiscale Canadienne is the property of Canadian Tax Foundation and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Language and accent strongly influence the formation of social groups. By five years of age, children already show strong social preferences for peers who speak their native language with a familiar accent (Kinzler, Shutts, DeJesus, & Spelke, 2009). However, little is known about the factors that modulate the strength and direction of children's accent-based group preferences. In three experiments, we examine the development of accent-based friendship preferences in children growing up in Toronto, one of the world's most linguistically and culturally diverse cities. We hypothesized that the speaker's type of accent and the amount of accent exposure children experienced in their everyday lives would modulate their preferences in a friend selection task. Despite literature suggesting that exposure leads to greater acceptance (Allport, 1954), we find no evidence that routine exposure to different accents leads to greater acceptance of unfamiliarly accented speakers. Children still showed strong preferences for peers who spoke with the locally dominant accent, despite growing up in a linguistically diverse community. However, children's preference for Canadian-accented in-group members was stronger when they were paired with non native (Korean-accented) speakers compared to when they were paired with regional (British-accented) speakers. We propose that children's ability to perceptually distinguish between accents may have contributed to this difference. Children showed stronger preferences for in-group members when the difference between accents was easier to perceive. Overall, our findings suggest that although the strength of accent-based social preferences can be modulated by the type of accent, these preferences still persist in the face of significant diversity in children's accent exposure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To develop adult-like communication skills, children need to learn to converse not only with individuals from their local community, but also with second-language learners who might have foreign accents. Here, we ask when infants can recognize foreign-accented word forms, and what the cognitive underpinnings are that enable children to map such surface forms onto established lexical representations. In line with reports using regional accents, Canadian-English learners recognize words forms in a foreign French accent by 18 months of age, indicating that the developmental trajectory of coping with foreign accents is not always more protracted than that of regional accents. Moreover, mispronounced versions of known words appear to be treated as nonwords, suggesting that children do not accept all phonemic substitutions when listening to foreign-accented speech. Thus, infants’ word form recognition is simultaneously flexible and at least somewhat specific, allowing them to cope with accents relatively efficiently from early on. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adults are skilled at using language to construct/negotiate identity and to signal affiliation with others, but little is known about how these abilities develop in children. Clearly, children mirror statistical patterns in their local environment (e.g., Canadian children using zed instead of zee), but do they flexibly adapt their linguistic choices on the fly in response to the choices of different peers? To address this question, we examined the effect of group membership on 7- to 9-year-olds' labeling of objects in a trivia game, exploring whether they were more likely to use a particular label (e.g., sofa vs. couch) if members of their "team" also used that label. In a preregistered study, children (N = 72) were assigned to a team (red or green) and were asked during experimental trials to answer questions-which had multiple possible answers (e.g., blackboard or chalkboard)-after hearing two teammates and two opponents respond to the same question. Results showed that children were significantly more likely to produce labels less commonly used by the community (i.e., dispreferred labels) when their teammates had produced those labels. Crucially, this effect was tied to group membership, and could not be explained by children simply repeating the most recently used label. These findings demonstrate how social processes (i.e., group membership) can guide linguistic variation in children., (© 2024 The Authors. Cognitive Science published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Cognitive Science Society (CSS).)

The disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has raised concerns about children's development. Here, we examined the impact of the pandemic on Canadian infants' and toddlers' (N = 539) language development. Specifically, we assessed changes in 11- to 34-month-olds' activities that are known to affect vocabulary development (i.e., screen and reading times). We also compared these children's vocabulary sizes with those of 1365 children collected before the pandemic using standardized vocabulary assessments. Our results show that screen and reading times were most negatively affected in lower-income children. For vocabulary growth, no measurable change was detected in middle- and high-income children, but lower-income 19- to 29-month-olds fared worse during the pandemic than during pre-pandemic times. Moving forward, these data indicate that educators and policymakers should pay particular attention to children from families with lower socioeconomic status during times of crisis and stress., (Copyright © 2023 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

When university students are asked to rate their instructors, their evaluations are often influenced by the demographic characteristics of the instructor-such as the instructor's race, gender, or language background. These influences can manifest in unfair systematic biases against particular groups of teachers and hamper movements to promote diversity in higher education. When and how do these biases develop? Here, we begin to address these questions by examining children's sociolinguistic biases against teachers who speak with different accents. To do this, we presented 5-year-old Canadian English-speaking children with pairs of adult talkers. Children were asked to select "who they'd like to be their teacher" then they rated "how good of a teacher" they thought each talker would be on a 5-point scale. In each trial, one talker spoke in the locally dominant variety of Canadian English, and the other spoke in a different accent. Children strongly preferred Canadian-accented teachers over teachers who spoke with non-native (i.e., French or Dutch) accents, but also demonstrated a preference for Canadian teachers over teachers who spoke with non-local regional accents (i.e., Australian or British). In line with the binary choice data, children rated the Canadian talkers more favourably. The relationship between the gender of the teacher and the gender of the child also impacted ratings. This work demonstrates that even at the onset of formal education, children may already exhibit signs of accent-based biases. We discuss these findings in relation to the growing literature on implicit bias in higher education.

The existence of the Language Familiarity Effect (LFE), where talkers of a familiar language are easier to identify than talkers of an unfamiliar language, is well-documented and uncontroversial. However, a closely related phenomenon known as the Other Accent Effect (OAE), where accented talkers are more difficult to recognize, is less well understood. There are several possible explanations for why the OAE exists, but to date, little data exist to adjudicate differences between them. Here, we begin to address this issue by directly comparing listeners' recognition of talkers who speak in different types of accents, and by examining both the LFE and OAE in the same set of listeners. Specifically, Canadian English listeners were tested on their ability to recognize talkers within four types of voice line-ups: Canadian English talkers, Australian English talkers, Mandarin-accented English talkers, and Mandarin talkers. We predicted that the OAE would be present for talkers of Mandarin-accented English but not for talkers of Australian English-which is precisely what we observed. We also observed a disconnect between listeners' confidence and performance across different types of accents; that is, listeners performed equally poorly with Mandarin and Mandarin-accented talkers, but they were more confident with their performance with the latter group of talkers. The present findings set the stage for further investigation into the nature of the OAE by exploring a range of potential explanations for the effect, and introducing important implications for forensic scientists' evaluation of ear witness testimony., (© 2021 Cognitive Science Society LLC.)

Infants struggle to understand familiar words spoken in unfamiliar accents. Here, we examine whether accent exposure facilitates accent-specific adaptation. Two types of pre-exposure were examined: video-based (i.e., listening to pre-recorded stories; Experiment 1) and live interaction (reading books with an experimenter; Experiments 2 and 3). After video-based exposure, Canadian English-learning 15- to 18-month-olds failed to recognize familiar words spoken in an unfamiliar accent. However, after face-to-face interaction with a Mandarin-accented talker, infants showed enhanced recognition for words produced in Mandarin English compared to Australian English. Infants with live exposure to an Australian talker were not similarly facilitated, perhaps due to the lower vocabulary scores of the infants assigned to the Australian exposure condition. Thus, live exposure can facilitate accent adaptation, but this ability is fragile in young infants and is likely influenced by vocabulary size and the specific mapping between the speaker and the listener's phonological system.

Bilingual and monolingual infants differ in how they process linguistic aspects of the speech signal. But do they also differ in how they process non-linguistic aspects of speech, such as who is talking? Here, we addressed this question by testing Canadian monolingual and bilingual 9-month-olds on their ability to learn to identify native Spanish-speaking females in a face-voice matching task. Importantly, neither group was familiar with Spanish prior to participating in the study. In line with our predictions, bilinguals succeeded in learning the face-voice pairings, whereas monolinguals did not. We consider multiple explanations for this finding, including the possibility that simultaneous bilingualism enhances perceptual attentiveness to talker-specific speech cues in infancy (even in unfamiliar languages), and that early bilingualism delays perceptual narrowing to language-specific talker recognition cues. This work represents the first evidence that multilingualism in infancy affects the processing of non-linguistic aspects of the speech signal, such as talker identity., (© 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)