Development of word recognition across speakers and accents

The pronunciation of a given word can contain considerable phonetic variation both within and between speakers, affects, and accents. For reliable word recognition, children must team to hear through the variation that does not change a word's identity, while still discerning variation that does not belong to a given word's identity. This requires knowledge of phonologically specified word invariants above the level of phonemic specification. Reviewing developmental accounts and empirical evidence, this chapter discusses the emergence of children's ability to attend to speaker- and accent-independent invariants. The authars focus particularly on changes between the ages of 7.5-10.5 months, where evidence points to a developing ability to recognize speech across within-speaker and "'!ithin-group variation, and 14-19 months, where increasing evidence suggests a shift from phonetically to more phonologically specified word forms. They propose a framework that describes the attentionalshifts involved in this progression, with emphasis on methodological concerns surrounding the interpretation of existing research