Use of phonetic detail in word learning

I will present a series of recent studies showing the difficulties that adults and toddlers have with learning similar sounding words. An emphasis will be placed on the interrelation between sound perception and word learning/recognition and whether or not there is continuity across these two abilities. It will be shown that success in novel word learning depends on the learner’s linguistic background, the task, and the type of phonetic cues that distinguish the novel words.