Infants in their first year manifest selective patterns of discrimination between languages and between accents of the same language. Prosodic differences are held to be important in whether languages can be discriminated, together with the infant's familiarity with one or both of the accents heard. However, the nature of the prosodic cues that…

This study investigates infants' discrimination abilities for familiar and unfamiliar regional English accents. Using a variation of the head-turn preference procedure, 5-month-old infants demonstrated that they were able to distinguish between their own South-West English accent and an unfamiliar Welsh English accent. However, this distinction…