When the Learning Gets Tough: Children's Accent-Based Learning Choices are Influenced by Processing Difficulty

Children use a variety of cues to decide who they can trust to be a credible source of information. One such cue is accent. Previous research has attributed accent-based preferences to a bias for in-group members. In the present study, we examine another potential contributor to these preferences: processing difficulty. Four- to seven-year-old children completed a selective word-learning task, in which they were presented with pairs of speakers and needed to choose one to learn a new word from. The speakers differed in accent type – native or non-native – and non-native speakers differed in how difficult their speech was to process. Children were more likely to choose to learn from the speaker whose speech was easier to process, and the magnitude of this effect was linearly related to the processing difficulty disparity between the two speakers: the greater the disparity, the stronger the effect. These findings are the first to demonstrate the role of processing difficulty in children's accent-based selective learning.