Attending to talker characteristics: Word learning and recognition in monolingually- and multilingually-raised infants

Abstract

Before age one, infants often fail to recognize words produced by new talkers or in new accents. We ask whether infant’s varying experiences, namely exposure to multiple languages or accented speech, might influence this ability. Monolingually and multilingually-raised North-American 8-month-olds were habituated to a novel word-object link, and tested to see whether they would increase their looking time (i.e. dishabituate) when 1) the word-object link was broken (i.e. hearing a new word with the old object or vice versa), and 2) when the word was produced by a new talker (Exp 1) or in a new accent (Exp 2) (i.e. changes that maintain the word-object link). Monolingually- and multilingually-raised infants dishabituated to all changes, suggesting that their varying accent and language experiences do not shape word learning and recognition as tested here. This work provides further evidence that 8-month-olds’ word-object links are non-adult-like from a more diverse group of participants.