Accent on language development : using dialects to trace how children come to recognise spoken words

Words are often pronounced differently across English accents ('dialects'), which can cause word misperceptions. Real-life cases include a Sydney waiter who replied 'we don' t serve dog here! when a Scottish customer asked for duck curry, and a Californian lifeguard who replied 'Bigger wives than .. . huh?' when a pair of Australian surfers asked him which local beach had bigger waves. But such mistakes are relatively rare. Adults generally understand words across a wide range of pronunciations, assisted by their lexical and grammatical knowledge and their understanding of context. Infants and toddlers, however, are language novices. They have very little lexical or grammatical knowledge to draw upon and a very restricted sense of conversational contexts and their experience is mostly restricted to the accent spoken at home. Given this, can they recognise familiar words spoken in a very different accent? Indeed, do they even know that a talker with an unfamiliar accent is speaking the same language as their parents? Importantly, what does the development of these skills reveal about children's emerging grasp of the linguistic structure of their language?