Table 2:

A small number of studies and real-world scenarios, experienced by child listeners, where each type of accent variability depicted in Figure 2 is observed.

Accents show identical patterning	One accent merges sounds	Accents have shifted cue boundaries	Accents separate patterns differently
German-accented and US-accented English /i/ vs. /i/ (Flege et al., 1997)	The typical depiction of AAE coda devoicing as merger (of, e.g., had and hat)	White & Aslin, 2011; Weatherhead & White, 2016	AAE vs. WAE coda voicing (Y. Holt et al., 2016)
Many similar vowel contrasts in Los Angeles Chicano English and WAE (Santa Ana & Bayley, 2008)	caught/cot merger in California WAE but not northeastern WAE; salary-celery /æ/-/ε/ merger before /l/ in East LA Chicano English (García, 1984)	Lax front vowels in Californian Vowel Shift (Eckert, 2008)	AAE > WAE child listeners at AAE and cross-dialect comprehension (Baran & Seymour, 1976)

Note. Unshaded cells contain experimental or quasi-experimental tests of effects of variability on recognition or comprehension; shaded cells contain real-language cases where such variability has been described or measured. Because there is relatively little evidence of facilitation vs. inhibition based on particular accent sound-pattern relationships, we do not mark facilitation/inhibition, but discuss it in the text.