Talker Variation Aids Young Infants’ Phonotactic Learning

We investigated how talker variability impacts novel phonological pattern learning in 4- and 11-month-olds. Both age groups were better able to discriminate between legal and illegal phonotactic strings after exposure to multiple talkers than a single talker. It is argued that these data may be best accounted for by hybrid models that include linguistic representations that abstract away from talker identity, provided that neither a lexicon nor a protolexicon is necessary to allow the separation of linguistic representations and talker identity.