However, this may not be simply an issue of general capacity limits, but the unique way in which word–object mappings must be used in the switch task may also create task-specific difficulty (e.g., Swingley & Aslin, 2002). However, there

are two interpretations of infants’ difficulties with this task: it could indicate that phoneme perception is robust at this age, but that a difficult task masks children’s ability to deploy these skills (e.g., Werker & Fennell, 2006). Alternatively, our work suggests that this difficult task reveals specific difficulties in speech perception. In an easy task, such as a checkerboard dishabituation or a looking-preference task, the nature of the task only requires infants to discriminate pairs of speech sounds—it is not necessary to ignore selleck any dimension, as a detectable difference in any of them should be sufficient to drive discrimination. In Maye et al.’s (2002, 2008) work, the

relevant statistics within a cue were sufficient to alter discrimination. However, the switch task is closer to a categorization task, in which many sources of information (irrelevant or relevant) selleckchem may be associated with the response. Thus, it may reveal a second component of perceptual development, dimensional weighting. Dimensional weighting is a key feature of PRIMIR (Werker & Curtin, 2005), but it was not explicitly tied to switch-task failure due to lack of empirical evidence. The results of our experiments suggest that this explicit relationship. For 14-month-olds

in the switch task, the statistics of contrastive cues are less helpful (as they are relevant to a problem that is already solved) than the statistics of noncontrastive cues (which are relevant to the problem Ribociclib of weighting). Thus, as numerous researchers have pointed out, the nature of the task is of fundamental importance to understanding results like these (Swingley & Aslin, 2002; Werker & Fennell, 2006; Yoshida et al., 2009). However, the overall difficulty of task perhaps does not fully describe why. Rather, what is important is the way that the task shapes how particular (and perhaps nonobvious) sources of information contribute to learning, the particular mappings that must be employed at test, and the kind of information used in those mappings (for a similar discussion, see Yoshida et al., 2009). Our interpretation of these results is that it is not that a difficult switch task masks intact phoneme perception, but rather that this difficult task highlights an aspect of speech perception is not yet well developed at this age. We may be left with the original conclusion of Stager and Werker (1997) that speech perception may not be developed sufficiently in 14-month-olds to fully support word learning. Importantly, the ability of variation to shape dimensional learning is likely to break down differently depending on the acoustic/phonetic properties in question.