ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how infants and toddlers cope with various types of variability in the pronunciation of words. Because many words are highly similar, word representations must be phonologically precise to avoid confusion. At the same time, given the variability of the speech signal, the recognition process must be flexible and responsive to context. The chapter explores the two sides of word recognition in young word learners. It deals with infants' treatment of lexically irrelevant variability and then turn to mispronunciations and accents. Mispronunciations are sporadic, and assimilation processes are learned as part of exposure to the native language. A more serious challenge for word learning is systematic variability introduced by speakers of different language communities. For naturally learned words, recognition in novel accents occurs even later. Although 15-month-olds generally prefer to listen to known words over unknown words, this preference disappears if the words are spoken in a non-native dialect; 19-month-olds exhibit a preference regardless of dialect.
