The role of talker-specific information in word segmentation by infants.

Infants' representations of the sound patterns of words were explored by examining the effects of talker variability on the recognition of words in fluent speech. Infants were familiarized with isolated words (e.g., cup and dog) from 1 talker and then heard 4 passages produced by another talker, 2 of which included the familiarized words. At 7.5 months of age, infants attended longer to passages with the familiar words for materials produced by...