Nor is it clear that manipulated speech in this case poses a problem as previous switch-task studies (Stager & Werker, 1997; for a review, see Werker & Fennell, 2006; for an example using voicing contrasts, see Pater et al., 2004) all used un-manipulated natural speech, and 14-month-olds consistently failed to learn minimal-pair words. A second possibility

is that the highly salient variation between speakers was more engaging and thus resulted in better learning. However, our analysis of infant habituation times renders unlikely the possibility that infants were more engaged as they had slightly fewer trials to habituation in Experiment 3 than in Experiments 1 and 2. A third Selleck JAK inhibitor possibility is that the more naturalistic variation in Experiment 3 also contained secondary cues to voicing. Yet, measurements of our stimuli rule out the possibility that the items retained perceptible variability of cues related to voicing. Moreover, if VOT was treated as a relative cue (which

is unlikely given the adult work), Experiment 3 substantially minimized variation in this contrastive dimension, and infants still learned the words. Finally, as we will discuss in more detail, the task demands (Yoshida et al., 2009) and lexical competition (Swingley & Aslin, 2007) frameworks offered as prior explanations for children’s failures in this task also do not predict the findings Selleck RAD001 reported in Experiment 3. As neither naturalness, saliency, contrastive acoustic cues, nor task demand Non-specific serine/threonine protein kinase explanations adequately

explain the results of Experiment 3, we are left with irrelevant speaker information as the driving force of this effect. It must therefore be that variability along dimensions that do not typically distinguish words, in fact helps 14-month-olds to acquire lexically contrastive phonetic representations. One simple account for this is that infants might not be fully committed to which cues are relevant for voicing by this age. If this were the case, then, variability along indexical dimensions helps infants learn that they are not relevant; conversely, the relative invariance of VOT points to its utility in contrasting words. Multitalker variability helps the infants with dimensional weighting (Toscano & McMurray, 2010a), the assignment of weight or importance to perceptual dimensions. Ongoing computational work (Apfelbaum & McMurray, 2010) shows how simple associative learning mechanisms can give rise to this. This model suggests that without speaker variability infants erroneously associate indexical and pitch cues with both words—when the same speaker is heard at test, then, both words receive partial support making it difficult to rule one out. The constant indexical cues, thus, interfere with establishing contrast.