Social Network Diversity Leads to More Flexible Speech Perception in School-aged Children

Traditionally, there has been a strong emphasis on capturing linguistic diversity as noise. In speech perception, for instance, Categorical Perception (CP) is one example of such perspective. CP argues that listeners discard variation and only consider information that is necessary to identify the sound category itself. The theory led to the use of tasks that ask listeners to discard variability (i.e., use of binary response). These tasks were then used to assess language-diverse individuals’ language processes, and when compared to more homogenous groups, language-diverse individuals’ speech categorization was found to be noisy. Here, we tested linguistically diverse school-aged children’s speech categorization and found that increased linguistic diversity led to more flexible and gradient speech categorization. To understand diversity, we need to question the frameworks’ assumptions and the tools we employ. Unlike the previous arguments, when captured ecologically, linguistic diversity shows us the adaptive nature of human cognition.