In fact, there were many linguistically irrelevant subphonemic and suprasegmental differences between the Spanish-accented and American speakers (Schmale & Seidl, selleck inhibitor 2009). Thus, it is possible that 9-month-olds failed because the differences between the accents were substantial. This is plausible,

given that younger infants are worse at “harder” word recognition tasks, as it has been shown for vowel-initial words (Mattys & Jusczyk, 2001; Seidl & Johnson, 2008), iambic words (Jusczyk, Houston, & Newsome, 1999; Nazzi, Dilley, Jusczyk, Shattuck-Hufnagel, & Jusczyk, 2005), and words in nonsalient prosodic positions (Seidl & Johnson, 2006). Thus, it was unclear which differences were responsible for the 9-month-olds’ difficulty. For example, Spanish-accented English deviates from North Midland-American English by way of subphonemic and suprasegmental

(sentence and word) differences. Here, instead, we examine developmental changes in infants’ word recognition abilities across two regional accents that differ minimally: North Midland-American English (infants’ ambient dialect) and Southern Ontario Canadian English (Labov et al., 2006). These dialectal accents should differ only in vowel implementation, as no reports have been made of differences at the consonantal or suprasegmental level (Clarke, Elms, & Youssef, 1995; Labov et al., 2006; Wells, 1982). Investigating the impact of vowel variation on word recognition provides insight into the relative specificity of early word representations in responding to irrelevant Palbociclib chemical structure phonetic information. Both 9- and 12-month-olds were familiarized with words 4-Aminobutyrate aminotransferase spoken in isolation, and subsequently tested with passages that either contained

the familiar words or not, as spoken by a speaker of a different dialectal accent. If infants recognized the familiar words in the passages during test, despite the speaker (and dialectal accent) change, they should exhibit a preference for passages containing the familiar words (e.g., Jusczyk & Aslin, 1995). A total of twenty-four 9-month-olds (M age = 9.01 months; range = 8.52–9.44 months; 11 females) and twenty-four 12-month-olds (M age = 12.14 months; range = 11.58–12.76 months;; 13 females) raised in the Midwest participated. Fifteen additional infants were excluded (11 owing to fussing, of which 2 were 12-month-olds; 1 as a result of parental interference; 1 because of prematurity; and 2 owing to foreign language exposure). After data were collected, parents of participants were invited to report both spouses’ dialect, and 33 responded. No parent had a Canadian accent, and all but one (English) had an American accent; there was only one case in which a child had both parents from non-Midwestern origins.