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Abstract Children exhibit preferences for familiar accents early in life. However, they frequently have more difficulty distinguishing between first language (L1) accents than second language (L2) accents in categorization tasks. Few studies have addressed children’s perception of accent strength, or the relation between accent strength and objective measures of pronunciation distance. To address these gaps, 6- and 12-year-olds and adults ranked talkers’ perceived distance from the local accent (i.e., Midland American English). Rankings were compared with objective distance measures. Acoustic and phonetic distance measures were significant predictors of ladder rankings, but there was no evidence that children and adults significantly differed in their sensitivity to accent strength. Levenshtein Distance, a phonetic distance metric, was the strongest predictor of perceptual rankings for both children and adults. As a percept, accent strength has critical implications for social judgments, which determine real world social outcomes for talkers with non-local accents. 

Abstract Online testing for behavioral research has become an increasingly used tool. Although more researchers have been using online data collection methods, few studies have assessed the replicability of findings for speech intelligibility tasks. Here we assess intelligibility in quiet and two noise-added conditions for several different accents of English (Midland American, Standard Southern British, Scottish, German-accented, Mandarin-accented, Japanese-accented, and Hindi-English bilingual). Participants were tested in person at a museum-based laboratory and online. Results showed little to no difference between the two settings for the easier noise condition and in quiet, but large performance differences in the most difficult noise condition with an advantage for the participants tested online. Technology-based variables did not appear to drive the setting effect, but experimenter presence may have influenced response strategy for the in-person group and differences in demographics could have provided advantages for the online group. Additional research should continue to investigate how setting, demographic factors, experimenter presence, and motivational factors interact to determine performance in speech perception experiments.