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Updated: May 1, 2026

Defining the Role Of Language in Infants' Object Categorization with Eye-tracking Paradigms
Published on: February 8, 2019
Monodialectal and multidialectal infants' representation of familiar words
Samantha Durrant1, Claire Delle Luche1, Allegra Cattani1
1School of Psychology,Plymouth University,UK.
Abstract:
Monolingual infants are typically studied as a homogenous group and compared to bilingual infants. This study looks further into two subgroups of monolingual infants, monodialectal and multidialectal, to identify the effects of dialect-related variation on the phonological representation of words. Using an Intermodal Preferential Looking task, the detection of mispronunciations in familiar words was compared in infants aged 1;8 exposed to consistent (monodialectal) or variable (multidialectal) pronunciations of words in their daily input. Only monodialectal infants detected the mispronunciations whereas multidialectal infants looked longer at the target following naming whether the label was correctly produced or not. This suggests that variable phonological input in the form of dialect variation impacts the degree of specificity of lexical representations in early infancy.
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