Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi-Oi-Oi: Infants love an Australian accent

This study examines infant’s attention to dialect differences following Nazzi et al.’s [J. Mem. Lang., 43, 1–19 (2000)] finding that American 5-month-olds can discriminate British- and American-English. Using a serial preference task, 48 6-month-old Australian and American infants heard sentence sets spoken in Australian- and American-English. Results showed that at 6 months, American infants listen longer to Australian than American sentences, but Australian infants show no preference. By 8 months, American infants also show no preference. The developmental lag suggests Australian infants have more exposure to the American dialect (e.g., television programs) than American infants to the Australian dialect. Thus, it is predicted, with less linguistic experience, Australian 3-month-olds will show a dialect preference comparable to American 6-month-olds. Data from 14 3-month-olds support this hypothesis; moreover, they also listen longer to Australian than American sentences. Together the results imply that the ability to generalize across two dialects is a function of experience, and that, with age, infants filter out irrelevant phonetic information and cluster American and Australian dialects into the same group. Future directions of this study are discussed as are the reasons why Australian English is the dialect of preference for infants from both dialect environments.