Moved around? You might process words differently than homebodies!

Marie Bissell – marie.bissell@uta.edu

University of Texas at Arlington, 701 S Nedderman Dr, Arlington, TX, 76019, United States

Abby Walker
Cynthia Clopper

Popular version of 3pSC2 – Effects of dialect familiarity and dialect exposure on cross-dialect lexical processing
Presented at the 188th ASA Meeting
Read the abstract at https://eppro01.ativ.me//web/index.php?page=IntHtml&project=ASAICA25&id=3868355

–The research described in this Acoustics Lay Language Paper may not have yet been peer reviewed–

Some of us grow up hearing mostly one dialect, while others of us have substantial exposure to multiple dialects, maybe because we’re in a pretty bidialectal community, or because we’ve moved between dialect regions. In our work, we’re investigating whether these differences in exposure to pronunciation variation impact how people recognize words.

Word recognition is a bit like a race in your head: there are lots of potential contenders, and your brain’s job is to sift through them really quickly. One thing that makes it easier to recognize a word is if it’s been recently activated: so if you hear “bed” then see <BED>, you’ll be really quick to recognize the written word, compared to if you had just heard a completely unrelated word, like “hat.” One thing that makes it harder to recognize a word is if you’ve just heard a competitor (a word that is pretty similar and therefore confusable with the target word), in this case, hearing something like “bad” before <BED>. We think activating these competitors makes recognition harder because when you hear the word “bad,” you suppress or inhibit competitor words like “bed.”

Figure 1: Map of the USA showing three major dialect regions: Northern, Midland and Southern. Image courtesy of Cynthia Clopper, and boundaries are based on Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006)]

Okay, so how does exposure to variability impact all this? In our experiments, participants heard words from different dialects and then matched them to written words. What we’ve been finding across a few studies with American English listeners is that people who have lived in multiple dialect regions (specifically moving between those highlighted in Figure 1) get less of a boost for matching words (“bed” > BED), and more robustly, less of a cost for competitor words (“bad” > BED). Why would this be the case? We think that if you’ve been exposed to lots of variation in pronunciation, you need to be more flexible as a listener: being too certain about what you heard (“oh, that’s definitely ‘bed’, not ‘bad’”) could make it difficult to recover when you’re wrong, and if there are lots of dialects around, there’s more room for you to be wrong! Importantly, we don’t see one style of listening as better or worse than another; rather, it looks like how we process words adapts to the particular challenges of the speech communities we grow up in!