This article reviews research on when acoustic‐phonetic variability facilitates, inhibits, or
does not impact perceptual development for spoken language, to illuminate mechanisms by …

The Language Familiarity Effect (LFE)—where listeners are better at processing talker‐voice
information in their native language than in an unfamiliar language—has received renewed …

A talking face provides redundant cues on the mouth that might support language learning
and highly salient social cues in the eyes. What drives children's looking toward the mouth …

How does one assess developmental change when the measures themselves change with
development? Most developmental studies of word learning use either looking (infants) or …

Abstract Comparison of different lines of research on statistical intuitions and probabilistic
reasoning reveals several puzzling contradictions. Whereas babies seem to be intuitive …

A critical indicator of spoken language knowledge is the ability to discern the finest possible
distinctions that exist between words in a language—minimal pairs, for example, the …

How and when do children become aware that speakers have different accents? While
adults readily make a variety of subtle social inferences based on speakers' accents …

To efficiently recognize words, children learning an intonational language like English
should avoid interpreting pitch‐contour variation as signaling lexical contrast, despite the …

Young children often hear speech in unfamiliar accents, but relatively little research
characterizes their comprehension capacity. The current study tested preschoolers' …

Recent work has shown that exposure to multiple languages affects nonlinguistic processing
of speech during infancy. Specifically, Fecher and Johnson found that bilingual 9-month …