Chapter 7. Early phonological acquisition in multi-accent contexts

Abstract

Many children acquire the sound system of their language(s) in multi-accent environments. Yet, the variation and inconsistencies that exist in the linguistic input to these children and the effects of variable input on early phonological development remain relatively underexplored and underrepresented in the field of language acquisition. This chapter provides an overview of the growing body of work that examines early phonological acquisition in diverse contexts. It first describes the monolingual and bilingual contexts in which the phonetic and phonological properties of adult input can be particularly variable, followed by the different types of input variability. The implications of variable input on phonological development in children are then discussed, before some recommendations for researching early phonological acquisition.