The Weckud Wetch of the Wast: Lexical Adaptation to a Novel Accent

Two experiments investigated the mechanism by which listeners adjust their interpretation of accented speech that is similar to a regional dialect of American English. Only a subset of the vowels of English (the front vowels) were shifted during adaptation, which consisted of listening to a 20‐min s...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cognitive science 2008-04, Vol.32 (3), p.543-562
Main Authors: Maye, Jessica, Aslin, Richard N., Tanenhaus, Michael K.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accent
Auditory Perception
Cognition & reasoning
Dialect
Dialects
English language
Experiments
Language Processing
Linguistics
Listening Comprehension
New York
North American English
Perceptual adaptation
Pronunciation
Sensory perception
Speech
Speech perception
Undergraduate Students
Vowels
Word Recognition
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Summary:Two experiments investigated the mechanism by which listeners adjust their interpretation of accented speech that is similar to a regional dialect of American English. Only a subset of the vowels of English (the front vowels) were shifted during adaptation, which consisted of listening to a 20‐min segment of the “Wizard of Oz.” Compared to a baseline (unadapted) condition, listeners showed significant adaptation to the accented speech, as indexed by increased word judgments on a lexical decision task. Adaptation also generalized to test words that had not been presented in the accented passage but that contained the shifted vowels. A control experiment showed that the adaptation effect was specific to the direction of the shift in the vowel space and not to a general relaxation of the criterion for what constitutes a good exemplar of the accented vowel category. Taken together, these results provide evidence for a context‐specific vowel adaptation mechanism that enables a listener to adjust to the dialect of a particular talker.
ISSN:0364-0213
1551-6709
DOI:10.1080/03640210802035357