Although adults rapidly adjust to accented speakers' pronunciation of words, young children appear to struggle when confronted with unfamiliar variants of their native language (e.g., American English-learning 15-month-olds cannot recognize familiar words spoken in Jamaican English; Best et al., 2009). It is currently unclear, however, why this is the case, or how infants overcome this apparent inability. Here, we begin to address these crucial questions. Experiments 1 and 2 confirm with a new population that infants are initially unable to recognize familiar words produced in unfamiliar accents. That is, Canadian English-learning infants cannot recognize familiar words spoken in Australian English until they near their second birthday. However, Experiments 3 and 4 show that this early inability to recognize accented words can readily be overcome when infants are exposed to a story read in the unfamiliar accent prior to test. Importantly, this adaptation only occurs when the story is highly familiar, consistent with the idea that top-down lexical feedback may enable the adaptation process. We conclude that infants, like adults, have the cognitive capacity to rapidly deduce the mapping between their own and an unfamiliar variant of their native language. Thus, the essential machinery underlying spoken language communication is in place much earlier than previous studies have suggested.

In gender-marking languages, the gender of the noun determines the form of the preceding article. In this study, we examined whether French-learning toddlers use gender-marking information on determiners to recognize words. In a split-screen preferential looking experiment, 25-month-olds were presented with picture pairs that referred to nouns with either the same or different genders. The target word in the auditory instruction was preceded either by the correct or incorrect gender-marked definite article. Toddlers' looking times to target shortly after article onset demonstrated that target words were processed most efficiently in different-gender grammatical trials. While target processing in same-gender grammatical trials recovered in the subsequent time window, ungrammatical articles continued to affect processing efficiency until much later in the trial. These results indicate that by 25 months of age, French-learning toddlers use gender information on determiners when comprehending subsequent nouns.

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