It is still unclear whether an individual’s adoption of on-going sound change starts in production or in perception, and what the time course of the adoption of sound change is in adult speakers. These issues are investigated by means of a large-scale (106 participants) laboratory study of an on-going vowel shift in Dutch. The shift involves the tense mid vowels /eː,øː,oː/, which are changing into phonologically conditioned upgliding diphthongs, and the original diphthongs /εi,œy,ɔu/, whose nuclei are lowering. These changes are regionally stratified: they have all but completed in the Netherlands, but have not affected the variety of Dutch spoken in neighboring Belgium. The study compares production (word-list reading) and perception (rhyme decision) data from control groups from each country to those of 18 “sociolinguistic migrants”: Belgian individuals who moved to the Netherlands years ago. Data are analyzed using mixed-effects models, considering not just the group level, but also individual differences. Production results show that at the group level, the migrant group is in between the two control groups, but at the individual level it becomes apparent that some migrants have adopted the Netherlandic norms, but others have not. Perception results are similar to the production results at the group level. Individual-level results do not provide a clear picture for the perception data, but the individual differences in perception correlate with those in production. The results agree with and extend previous findings on the role of individual differences in the individual adoption and eventual community propagation of on-going sound change.

Using the visual-word paradigm, the present study investigated the effects of word onset and offset masking on the time course of non-native spoken-word recognition in the presence of background noise. In two experiments, Dutch non-native listeners heard English target words, preceded by carrier sentences that were noise-free (Experiment 1) or contained intermittent noise (Experiment 2). Target words were either onset- or offset-masked or not masked at all. Results showed that onset masking delayed target word recognition more than offset masking did, suggesting that – similar to natives – non-native listeners strongly rely on word onset information during word recognition in noise.

Listeners frequently recognize spoken words in the presence of background noise. Previous research has shown that noise reduces phoneme intelligibility and hampers spoken-word recognition – especially for non-native listeners. In the present study, we investigated how noise influences lexical competition in both the non-native and the native language, reflecting the degree to which both languages are co-activated. We recorded the eye movements of native Dutch participants as they listened to English sentences containing a target word while looking at displays containing four objects. On target-present trials, the visual referent depicting the target word was present, along with three unrelated distractors. On target-absent trials, the target object (e.g., wizard) was absent. Instead, the display contained an English competitor, overlapping with the English target in phonological onset (e.g., window), a Dutch competitor, overlapping with the English target in phonological onset (e.g., wimpel, pennant), and two unrelated distractors. Half of the sentences was masked by speech-shaped noise; the other half was presented in quiet. Compared to speech in quiet, noise delayed fixations to the target objects on target-present trials. For target-absent trials, we observed that the likelihood for fixation biases towards the English and Dutch onset competitors (over the unrelated distractors) was larger in noise than in quiet. Our data thus show that the presence of background noise increases lexical competition in the task-relevant non-native (English) and in the task-irrelevant native (Dutch) language. The latter reflects stronger interference of one’s native language during non-native spoken-word recognition under adverse conditions.

Humans possess a robust speech-perception apparatus that is able to cope with variation in spoken language. However, linguists have often claimed that this coping ability must be limited, since otherwise there is no way for such variation to lead to language change and regional accents. Previous research has shown that the presence or absence of perceptual compensation is indexed by the N400 and P600 components, where the N400 reflects the general awareness of accented speech input, and the P600 responds to phonological-rule violations. The present exploratory paper investigates the hypothesis that these same components are involved in the accommodation to sound change, and that their amplitudes reduce as a sound change becomes accepted by an individual. This is investigated on the basis of a vowel shift in Dutch that has occurred in the Netherlands but not in Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium). Netherlandic and Flemish participants were presented auditorily with words containing either conservative or novel vowel realizations, plus two control conditions. Exploratory analyses found no significant differences in ERPs to these realizations, but did uncover two systematic differences. Over 9 months, the N400 response became less negative for both groups of participants, but this effect was significantly smaller for the Flemish participants, a finding in line with earlier results on accent processing. Additionally, in one control condition where a “novel” realization was produced based on vowel lengthening, which cannot be achieved by any rule of either Netherlandic or Flemish Dutch and changes the vowel's phonemic identity, a P600 was obtained in the Netherlandic participants, but not in the Flemish participants. This P600 corroborates a small number of other studies which found phonological P600s, and provides ERP validation of earlier behavioral results that adaptation to variation in speech is possible, until the variation crosses a phoneme boundary. The results of this exploratory study thus reveal two types of perceptual-compensation (dys)function: on-line accent processing, visible as N400 amplitude, and failure to recover from an ungrammatical realization that crosses a phoneme boundary, visible as a P600. These results provide further insight on how these two ERPs reflect the processing of variation.

This paper investigates the adoption of ongoing community sound change by individuals by considering it as an instance of second-dialect acquisition. Four ongoing changes in Dutch, all involving the move from one-allophone to two-allophone systems, make this possible: these ongoing diachronic changes are simultaneously a source of synchronic variation between Netherlandic Dutch and Flemish Dutch. The paper investigates the adoption of these differences by sociolinguistic migrants: Flemish-Dutch speakers who migrated to the Netherlands to start their university studies. Participants were tracked over the course of nine months, using a rhyme-decision task and a word-list-reading task. Results show robust differences from Netherlandic-Dutch controls, which do not diminish over the nine months. While longer-term accommodation to these same changes has been found elsewhere, it appears that nine months is not enough time. The implications of these findings for various subfields of linguistics, particularly sound change and second-dialect acquisition, are discussed.