Accent variation and the development of speech and language abilities

Abstract

Accent variation is a central feature of human language. As adults, we readily adapt to different varieties of our native language, but we also use accent information to make a variety of social inferences. Thus, our treatment of accents sits squarely at the intersection of language and social processing. Despite the ubiquity of accent variation and its importance in our mental lives, it was long absent from studies in the field of infant development. Although the complexities of bilingual input were recognized, the study of monolingual language development proceeded as if all infants were exposed to a single variety of their native language. This perspective shaped our theories of speech and language development. The first study to explore infants’ perception of accents was published in 2000. Over the past 25 years, there has been a steady increase in work on infants’ treatment of new accent varieties, their handling of multiple varieties in their natural input, and their accent-based social inferences. There is much left to be learned about just how infants navigate the rich tapestry of speech variation in their environments, but this work has already provided an important window into the nature of infants’ speech representations and has upended our understanding of how early links between language and social variation are formed. We conclude our review by highlighting how understanding infants’ treatment of accent variation is critical for developing models that can account for efficient speech and language development in linguistically diverse contexts.