Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Before infants become mature speakers of their nativelanguage, they must acquire a robust word-recognition systemwhich allows them to strike the balance between allowingsome variation (mood, voice, accent) and recognizingvariability that potentially changes meaning (e.g. cat vs hat).The current meta-analysis quantifies how the latter, termedmispronunciation sensitivity, changes over infants’ first threeyears, testing competing predictions of mainstream languageacquisition theories. Our results show that infants weresensitive to mispronunciations, but accepted them as labelsfor target objects. Interestingly, and in contrast to predictionsof mainstream theories, mispronunciation sensitivity was notmodulated by infant age, suggesting that a sufficientlyflexible understanding of native language phonology is inplace at a young age.