Description:

Expecting the unexpected: How long-term exposure to dialectal variation may change listening strategies. 

In this talk I discuss three studies that explore how long-term exposure to dialectal variation shapes listener performance. First, migrants to a second dialect region do better with the second dialect in a sentence transcription in noise task than non-migrants, at no clear cost to their performance with their native dialect. Second, listeners who have lived in multiple dialect regions exhibit less facilitation and less inhibition in a form priming task than listeners who have lived in a single dialect region, which we currently interpret as being the product of a less committed listening strategy. Lastly, listeners who self-report being accented show more sensitivity to speaker-dialect pairings than "unaccented" listeners, reflecting either that they are paying more attention to this information, or are better able to use this information. Taken together, these results paint a picture where linguistic experience doesn't simply shape representations. Rather, the nature of that experience (more homogenous, more heterogeneous) shapes listening strategies or mechanisms.