The role of variability in voice and foreign accent in the development of early word representations

This dissertation details 10 experiments that examine the impact of variability in voice and foreign accent on the word recognition abilities of English-learning 9- and 13-month-olds (Experiments 1 – 6) and the word learning abilities of English-learning 24- and 30-month-olds (Experiments 7-10). The findings reveal evidence about the flexibility of infants’ and toddlers’ representations across development, particularly when confronted with subphonemic and suprasegmental variability. Further, the pattern of results provides support for two functional reorganizations of young children’s phonological and lexical representations in which representations seem to progress from highly specific to abstract in accommodating extraneous acoustic variability