Adult perception of children’s speech

Abstract

The utterances of six preschool children were recorded and used as stimuli in a perception task. The parents of the recorded children and adults with no recent exposure to children listened to the utterances and judged the meaning of the stimuli. Parents were more proficient than nonparents, and this difference was not limited to the parents’ superior knowledge of their own children’s ideolects. It was argued that there is a sense in which adults with an extensive exposure to children’s language may be considered to be bilinguals. © 1972, The Psychonomic Society, Inc.. All rights reserved.