How variable input shapes word recognition

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Word learning is a core part of language development - all other aspects of language intersect at the level of the word. And it is a surprisingly complex task. Word learners face two major categorization problems - in addition to determining the sets of objects in the world to which words should be mapped, they must also determine the set of tokens that constitute the same word. This is a difficult problem because no two instances of a word are acoustically identical. Some differences within and across speakers do not affect the meanings of words. However, when words are produced by speakers with different accents, changes can also occur along dimensions that alter the meanings of words. For example, when a French speaker produces the English word “pig”, it may sound to an English listener like the word “big”, because of differences in how the sounds “b” and “p” are produced in the two languages.