Accent the Positive paper out

The first paper from our Accent the Positive project is out, featuring both Laurie and lab alum Stephanie Martin Vega.

This work (see more here) looks at the development of accentism in primary school children. In other words, when do kids start assigning negative and positive value judgements to speakers with different accents? In our data, we find 5-year-olds in Essex already harbor positive associations between the standard accent (Southern Standard British English) and distinguish it from the lesser-valued Essex accent of their own parents.

This was a fun one to work on, with Stephanie doing an amazing job keeping 5-year-olds focused and still while we gathered EEG data. The EEG was critical to letting us look at implitic judgements from the kids, adding a lot of nuance to our understanding of how these judgements come about in childhood. Here’s to more developmental accent work!