Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Toddlers are notoriously difficult to understand, yet like accented speakers, their productions tend to systematically differfrom adult productions. Thus, we hypothesize that listeners with routine exposure to toddlers (perhaps even toddlersthemselves) should comprehend toddlers best. Three listener groups were tested on their comprehension of toddlersutterances in an eye-tracking study; forty-eight toddlers (Mage= 33 months), sixteen undergraduates with little experiencearound children (Mage= 18 years), and sixteen mothers of young children (Mage=38 years). All listeners looked longerto targets than distractors (p ¡ 0.05), with mothers and undergraduates target fixations significantly greater than toddlers(p ¡ 0.001). Mothers target fixations (78%) did not differ significantly from undergraduates (74%; p = 0.17). Thesepreliminary findings suggest a complex picture regarding the role of experience in comprehending toddlers utterances.Clearly, however, toddlers do not outperform adults in understanding toddlers.