Do 14-month-old infants prefer the more commonly heard glottal-stop pronunciation of familiar words over the canonical pronunciation, or do they accept both pronunciations as equivalent, suggesting that they have learned to associate the two sounds?

This study builds on some previous work from the lab that looked at the sounds that infants hear from their parents in their day-to-day lives and found that certain sounds (known as glottal-stops) were more common than the “prototypical” (or canonical) form at the end of words. In this experiment, we want to see whether or not 14 month olds prefer this more common sound to the prototypical version in a set of known words, or if they accept both variants at the end of words, suggesting that they have associated the two sounds. This study aims to set up a general timeline for how children learn the sound systems of their language(s).