How infants and young children cope with accent variation
Elizabeth K. Johnson
University of Toronto, Mississauga
 
Developmental speech perception research has traditionally focused on explaining language development in the monolingual (often English- or French-learning) child. More recently, researchers have started working with more diverse language-learning populations, including children with exposure to more than one language or more than one regional variant of the native language. In this talk, I will examine word recognition in monolingual infants and toddlers with exposure to either one or several variants of the native language. Three questions will be addressed: 1) When do infants first recognize familiar words spoken in an unfamiliar accent? 2) How do toddlers adapt to unfamiliar variants of the native language?, and 3) How does multi-accent exposure impact young children's social and phonological development? I will conclude that children are remarkably adept at coping with a wide variety of language-learning scenarios, and suggest that language researchers may need to re-think their concept of the typical monolingual.