Abstract

Words sound slightly different each time they are said, both by the same talker and across talkers. Rather than hurting learning, lab studies suggest that between- and withintalker variability helps infants learn minimal-pairs. To set the stage for linking naturally-occurring variability to vocabulary and word production, we quantified acoustic variability in the SEEDLingS corpus by measuring well-established acoustic properties on all tokens of the top concrete nouns (e.g. ball). These measurements reveal that both between- and within- talker variability is readily available in infants’ input, in similar ways to the variability measured in lab stimuli. Further, while between-talker variability is related to the number of talkers in the input, within-talker variability is not related to number of talkers, proportion of the input from the top talker, or tokencount. Next steps will link naturally-occurring variability ‘in the wild’ to vocabulary and word production.