Development of perceptual flexibility

In multicultural and multilingual societies, perceptual flexibility – the ability to recognize words with novel pronunciations, such as those encountered in unfamiliar dialects and accents – is an essential skill for children’s receptive language development. Without this ability frequent errors in mapping input to words in the lexicon would occur. To assess how unfamiliar accents impact word recognition during development, the word recognition abilities of 5to 12-year-old children and young adults were tested with nativeand nonnative-accented speech in quiet and noise. Results showed that perception of non-native speech develops slowly with adult-like abilities emerging only in adolescence. Perceptual flexibility may emerge late in development because extensive linguistic input and knowledge are required to accurately map novel acoustic-phonetic patterns onto known words. Compared to familiar native accents, the accurate perception of non-native accents may also more heavily recruit cognitive skills that continue to develop into adolescence (e.g., working memory, executive functions).