Linking acoustic variability in the infants' input to their early word production

Exposure to talker variability shapes how learning unfolds in the lab, and occurs in the everyday speech infants hear in daily life. Here, we asked whether aspects of talker variability in speech input are also linked to the onset of word production. We further asked whether these effects were redundant with effects of speech register (i.e., whether speech input was adult- vs. child-directed). To do so, we first extracted a set of highly common nouns from a longitudinal corpus of home recordings from North-American English-learning infants. We then used the acoustic variability in how these tokens were said to predict when the children first produced these same nouns. We found that in addition to frequency, variability in how words sound in 6–17 month's input predicted when children first said these words. Furthermore, while the proportion of child-directed speech also predicted the month of first production, it did so alongside measurements of acoustic variability in children's real-world input. Together, these results add to a growing body of literature suggesting that variability in how words sound in the input is linked to learning both in the lab and in daily life.

Research Highlights

• Talker variability shapes learning in the lab and exists in everyday speech; we asked whether it predicts word learning in the real world.
• Acoustic measurements of early words in infants' input (and their frequency) predicted when infants first said those same words.
• Speech register also predicted when infants said words, alongside effects of talker variability.
• Our results provide a deeper understanding of how sources of variability inherent to children's input connect to their learning and development.