The Development of Language Constancy: Attention to Native Versus Nonnative Accents Christine Kitamura University of Western Sydney and University of Western Sydney Robin Panneton Virginia Tech Catherine T. Best University of Western Sydney and ?????? 1 The time frame for infants’ acquisition of language constancy was probed, using the phonetic variation in a rarely heard accent (South African English) or a frequently heard accent (American English). A total of 156 Australian infants were tested. Six-month-olds looked longer to Australian English than less commonly heard South African accent, but at 9 months, showed similar looking times. With the more frequently heard Ameri- can accent, 3-month-olds looked longer to Australian and American English, whereas 6-month-olds looked equally. Together these results imply that in the first year, differential attention to native versus nonnative accents decreases as infants develop a sense of language constancy for the common native language. How- ever, experience with the nonnative accent can expedite this process. Adults have little difficulty understanding most people who speak in another accent of their lan- guage. Being language novices, infants and young toddlers must first discover that accented native speech is not a foreign language—yet virtually nothing is known about how young infants handle the pronunciation variants of regional accents. At some point in development, other regional accents must become acceptable as variants of that lan- guage. All speech contains phonetic variability due to a range of talker characteristics, for example, gender, speech rate, emotional state, and speech style. However, unfamiliar accents present a special perceptual challenge given that such speech con- tains both talker variability as well as variation manifested in systematic differences in pronuncia- tion patterns. Although infants learn quite early in life to accommodate the talker variability in their own accent (Jusczyk, Pisoni, & Mullenix, 1992; Kuhl & Miller, 1982), little is known about how they meet the challenge of identifying native language structure when it is spoken in an unfamiliar accent. In the first year of life, infants cultivate a detailed knowledge of the sound patterning of their native language. Such knowledge requires that infants maintain or improve discrimination of native lan- guage phonemes, and at the same time show the ability to ignore the differences in most nonnative contrasts (Best, McRoberts, & Sithole, 1988; Werker & Lalonde, 1988; Werker & Tees, 1984). However, this is only one side of the story of attunement to the native language, which also requires that infants perceive variation within the native lan- guage, including both talker-related variation and native versus nonnative accents, as belonging to the same language, despite pronunciation differences. As Best and colleagues have argued, word learning toddlers need to grasp the complementary princi- ples of phonological distinctiveness and phonological constancy (Best, Tyler, Gooding, Orlando, & Quann, 2009). They must come to understand the function- ally crucial difference that occurs when a phonemic change, for example, between two contrasting vow- els, signals two distinctive words, for example, “bears” and “beers”; versus ignoring the differences This research was supported by funding from Australian Research Council Discovery Grant DP0772441 and a University of Western Sydney International Research Initiatives Scheme (80314). We thank Denis Burnham for encouraging the collabora- tion, and the mothers and babies and research assistants who helped with the studies. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Christine Kitamura, Marcs Institute, University of Western Syd- ney, NSW, Australia. Electronic mail may be sent to c.kitamura@ uws.edu.au 2 . © 2012 The Authors Child Development © 2012 Society for Research in Child Development, Inc. All rights reserved. 0009-3920/2012/xxxx-xxxx DOI: 10.1111/cdev.12068 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 Child Development, xxxx 2012, Volume 00, Number 0, Pages 1–15 C D E V 1 2 0 6 8 B Dispatch: 19.12.12 Journal: CE: Deepa R Journal Name Manuscript No. Author Received: No. of pages: 15 PE: Karpagavalli