By by the age of just two years, toddlers are very good at understanding speakers who have accents they may never have heard before, a new study has found.

According to the findings, even children as young as 15 months, who may initially have problems understanding an unfamiliar accent, quickly learn to understand it after a short time.

Researchers from the University of Toronto in Canada wanted to assess how infants, who are in the early stages of learning their first language cope, with different accents.

"Fifteen-month-olds typically say relatively few words, yet they can learn to understand someone with a completely unfamiliar accent. This shows that infants' language comprehension abilities are surprisingly sophisticated," the researchers said.

This marks the first study to demonstrate the how fast children can adapt to different accents at such a young age.

"Adults with many years of language experience typically get better at understanding unfamiliar accents over time. These studies show that infants, who are still in the process of figuring out their native language, possess similar abilities from very early on," the researchers added.

Details of these findings are published in The Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.