Adult processing of other-accented speech is fast, dependent on lexical access, and readily generalizable to new words. But what does children's processing of other-accented speech look like? Although many acquisition researchers have emphasized how other-accented speech presents a formidable challenge to young children, we argue that the field has perhaps underestimated children's early accent processing abilities. In support of this view, we present evidence that 2-year-olds’ accent processing abilities appear to be in many respects adult-like, and discuss the growing literature on children's ability to cope with multi-accent input in the natural world. We outline different theoretical outlooks on the transition children make from infancy to later childhood, and discuss how the growing sophistication of infants’ accent processing abilities feeds into their social perception of the world (and perhaps vice versa). We also argue that efficient processing and meaningful interpretation of accent variation are fundamental to human cognition, and that early proficiency with accent variation (along with all of the implied representational and learning capacities) is difficult to explain without assuming the early emergence of abstract speech representations.

中文翻译：

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导航口音变化：发展的观点

其他口音语音的成人处理速度很快，依赖于词汇访问，并且很容易推广到新单词。但是孩子们对其他口音的处理是什么样的呢？尽管许多习得研究人员强调了其他口音对幼儿的巨大挑战，但我们认为该领域可能低估了儿童的早期口音处理能力。为了支持这一观点，我们提出证据表明 2 岁儿童的口音处理能力在许多方面似乎与成人相似，并讨论了有关儿童在自然界中应对多口音输入的能力的越来越多的文献。我们概述了关于儿童从婴儿期到童年后期过渡的不同理论观点，并讨论婴儿口音处理能力的日益成熟如何影响他们对世界的社会认知（反之亦然）。我们还认为，对口音变化的有效处理和有意义的解释是人类认知的基础，如果不假设抽象语音表征的早期出现，就很难解释早期对口音变化的熟练程度（以及所有隐含的表征和学习能力） .