Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How does a naive language learner deal with speaker variationirrelevant to distinguishing word meanings? Experimental datais contradictory, and incompatible models have been proposed.Here, we examine basic assumptions regarding the acousticsignal the learner deals with: Is speaker variability a hurdle indiscriminating sounds or can it easily be ignored? To this end,we summarize existing infant data. We then present machine-based discriminability scores of sound pairs obtained withoutany language knowledge. Our results show that speaker vari-ability decreases sound contrast discriminability, and that somecontrasts are affected more than others. However, chance per-formance is rare; most contrasts remain discriminable in theface of speaker variation. We take our results to mean thatspeaker variation is not a uniform hurdle to discriminatingsound contrasts, and careful examination is necessary whenplanning and interpreting studies testing whether and to whatextent infants (and adults) are sensitive to speaker differences.