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Spoken language conveys rich sociolinguistic information about a speaker's language background. Previous research indicates that both monolingual and bilingual children use this information when making social decisions. They prefer local speakers whose accent or variety matches their own over speakers of foreign languages or second-language speakers. What remains unclear is how exposure to diverse linguistic communities affects children's preferences for non-local accents. This study examines social preferences for a regional and a second-language accent as a function of prior exposure to diverse accents and languages, measured on a continuous scale. German-speaking primary-school children (aged 7–10) were asked to choose stickers in a forced-choice task using animated cartoon characters. We replicated the observed social preferences for one's local accent. Interestingly, when the local accent was absent, children socially preferred a second-language accent (American) over a first-language regional accent (Bavarian), even though both accents were equally intelligible and relatively unfamiliar to the children, as determined through a sentence repetition task and a geographical classification task. Children's choices were not explained by continuous measures of accent or bilingual exposure. The results suggest a complex interaction of various factors not limited to the speakers' first- or second-language status.

One of the many purposes for which social robots are designed is education, and there have been many attempts to systematize their potential in this field. What these attempts have in common is the recognition that learning can be supported in a variety of ways because a learner can be engaged in different activities that foster learning. Up to now, three roles have been proposed when designing these activities for robots: as a teacher or tutor, a learning peer, or a novice. Current research proposes that deciding in favor of one role over another depends on the content or preferred pedagogical form. However, the design of activities changes not only the content of learning, but also the nature of a human–robot social relationship. This is particularly important in language acquisition, which has been recognized as a social endeavor. The following review aims to specify the differences in human–robot social relationships when children learn language through interacting with a social robot. After proposing categories for comparing these different relationships, we review established and more specific, innovative roles that a robot can play in language-learning scenarios. This follows Mead’s (1946) theoretical approach proposing that social roles are performed in interactive acts. These acts are crucial for learning, because not only can they shape the social environment of learning but also engage the learner to different degrees. We specify the degree of engagement by referring to Chi’s (2009) progression of learning activities that range from active, constructive, toward interactive with the latter fostering deeper learning. Taken together, this approach enables us to compare and evaluate different human–robot social relationships that arise when applying a robot in a particular social role.

An unresolved issue in social perception concerns the effect of perceived ethnicity on speech processing. Bias-based accounts assume conscious misunderstanding of native speech in the case of a speaker classification as nonnative, resulting in negative ratings and poorer comprehension. In contrast, exemplar models of socially indexed speech perception suggest that such negative effects arise only when a contextual cue to the social identity is misleading, i.e. when ethnicity and speech clash with listeners’ expectations. To address these accounts, and to assess ethnicity effects across different age groups, three non-university populations (N = 172) were primed with photographs of Asian and white European women and asked to repeat and rate utterances spoken in three accents (Korean-accented German, a regional German accent, standard German), all embedded in background noise. In line with exemplar models, repetition accuracy increased when the expected and perceived speech matched, but the effect was limited to the foreign accent, and—at the group level—to teens and older adults. In contrast, Asian speakers received the most negative accent ratings across all accents, consistent with a bias-based view, but group distinctions again came into play here, with the effect most pronounced in older adults, and limited to standard German for teens. Importantly, the effects varied across ages, with younger adults showing no effects of ethnicity in either task. The findings suggest that theoretical contradictions are a consequence of methodological choices, which reflect distinct aspects of social information processing.

This paper addresses how morphosyntactic variation stemming from the Alemannic regional variety is perceived, evaluated, and judged in written and spoken language. Based on data from a questionnaire and speeded grammaticality judgments, this study examines which grammatical variants are salient to the listener as a function of speaker accent (regional vs. standard) and listener background (students from different school types and cities). The results show that, in addition to the regional morphosyntax, regional accent co-determines grammaticality judgements, in particular for naive listeners. Expert listener (students of language and literature) judgements are less affected by speaker accent, and appear to follow their subjective normative expectations concerning the prescriptive syntax usage. The most normative judgments on both syntactic and phonological levels were observed for dialectal variants within a group of high school students, despite being active users of the Alemannic variety. This result is a likely consequence of an explicit discard of dialect usage during classroom interactions.

According to usage-based models of phonology, the more frequently a word is used and perceived in accented pronunciation variants, the more exemplars of accented tokens are stored and then used for subsequent productions of this word. This may lead to greater production variability in speakers with more variable input than in speakers with less variable input (cf. Pierrehumbert, 2001). This contrasts with abstractionist theories and with proposals according to which children unconsciously filter out accent features. This study assesses the effects of variable input and lexical frequency on speech production by children (mean age 9;10) growing up with one or more languages and with exposure to regional varieties and foreign accents. In a picture-naming task, 60 children were tested on their production of eight German vowels. Children who experience more input variability produced more variable vowels in terms of greater Euclidean distances. Vowels in frequent words were produced with more variability than in infrequent words. Vowel position (F1) differed depending on language background (monolingual versus bilingual) and amount of input in regional varieties. The results imply that greater input variation can account for variable vowel production, in line with usage-based theories.