Abstract
<p>Towards the end of their first year of life, infants learn to ignore variation in sounds not present, or not functional, in their ambient language. Specifically, overly specified word representations are thought to give way to others with which learners can cope better with indexical variation, such as voice and affect, which are not relevant to word identity. This developmental change may help infants in their second year to more efficiently process the ambient language and thus make rapid gains in vocabulary. One particular kind of variability that infants must accommodate is that of dialectal accent, since most children will encounter speakers from different regions and backgrounds. In this study, we explore developmental changes in infants’ ability to recognize words in continuous speech by familiarizing them with words spoken by a speaker of their own region (North Midland American English) or a different region (Southern Ontario Canadian English), and testing them with passages spoken by a speaker of the opposite dialectal accent. Our results demonstrate that 12- but not 9-month-olds readily recognize words in the face of dialectal variation.</p>