Recent findings on early word recognition and learning: Representational change in adapting to variability in voice, foreign accent, and dialect.

A core aspect of recognizing and learning words is accommodating variable acoustic forms. Thus, to become proficient learners, infants and toddlers must adapt to the inherent variability of speech, where words frequently vary in form depending on a host of talker characteristics (e.g., voice, emotional state, foreign accent, dialect, speaking rate). Four sets of experiments examined the impact of variability in voice, foreign accent, and dialect on the abilities of English-learning infants and toddlers to recognize and learn words. The findings reveal evidence about the flexibility of early representations across development. In the face of subphonemic and suprasegmental variability, young infants and toddlers seem to encode and store fine acoustic-phonetic details about the words they hear, which impedes their ability to recognize and learn dissimilar instances of the same word. Alternatively, older infants and toddlers more readily accommodate extraneous acoustic variability by abstracting across dissimilar word forms, leading to more successful recognition and learning. Although younger children display more difficulty adapting to irrelevant acoustic variation, preliminary findings reveal benefits to exposure to variability in inducing more abstract, flexible representations. [Alejandrina Cristià, Elizabeth Johnson, and Amanda Seidl.]