In most of the world, people have regular exposure to multiple accents. Therefore, learning to quickly process accented speech is a prerequisite to successful communication. In this paper, we examine work on the perception of accented speech across the lifespan, from early infancy to late adulthood. Unfamiliar accents initially impair linguistic processing by infants, children, younger adults, and older adults, but listeners of all ages come to adapt to accented speech. Emergent research also goes beyond these perceptual abilities, by assessing links with production and the relative contributions of linguistic knowledge and general cognitive skills. We conclude by underlining points of convergence across ages, and the gaps left to face in future work.

Lexical neighbors (words sharing phonological structure with a target word) have been shown to influence the expression of phonetic contrasts for vowels and initial voiceless consonants. Focusing on minimal pair neighbors (e.g., bud—but), this research extends this work by examining the production of voiced as well as voiceless stops in both initial and final syllable/word position. The results show minimal pair neighbors can result both in enhancement and reduction of voicing contrasts (in initial vs final position), and differentially affect voiced vs voiceless consonants. These diverse effects of minimal pair neighbors serve to constrain interactive theories of language processing.

No abstract

Although there is a well-established tradition of social engagement in sociolinguistics, there is little explicit discussion of the rationale, methods, and procedures for implementing the principle of linguistic gratuity. What approaches to the dissemination of sociolinguistic information must be adopted with communities and with the general public when language diversity is interpreted in terms of a prescriptive, correctionist model? What venues, activities, and products are the most effective in dialect awareness programs? And how does linguistcommunity collaboration work on a practical level? We consider theoretical, methodological, and practical issues in sociolinguistic engagement and dialect awareness outreach programs based on a range of experience in a variety of local and general public venues. The approach is based on the principle that the public is inherently curious about language differences and that this intrigue can be transformed into informal and formal public education. It is further premised on evidence that language differences can be linked to legitimate historical and cultural legacies, and that positively framed presentations of language differences in sociocultural and sociohistorical contexts can effectively counter dominant, seemingly unassailable ideologies in non-confrontational ways. A variety of venues are considered in collaborative engagement, including video documentaries, oral history CDs, museum exhibits, formal curricular programs, and popular trade books on language differences. Challenges in operationalizing linguistic gratuity include working with the community; balancing community linguistic expertise and community perspectives; design and audience, and practical logistical issues.

When encountering speakers whose accents differ from the listener's own, listeners initially show a processing cost, but that cost can be attenuated after short term exposure. The extent to which processing foreign accents (L2-accents) and within-language accents (L1-accents) is similar is still an open question. This study considers whether listeners' expectations about the source of a speaker's accent—whether the speaker is purported to be an L1 or an L2 speaker—affect intelligibility. Prior work has indirectly manipulated expectations about a speaker's accent through photographs, but the present study primes listeners with a description of the speaker's accent itself. In experiment 1, native English listeners transcribed Spanish-accented English sentences in noise under three different conditions (speaker's accent: monolingual L1 Latinx English, L1-Spanish/L2-English, no information given). Results indicate that, by the end of the experiment, listeners given some information about the accent outperformed listeners given no information, and listeners told the speaker was L1-accented outperformed listeners told to expect L2-accented speech. Findings are interpreted in terms of listeners' expectations about task difficulty, and a follow-up experiment (experiment 2) found that priming listeners to expect that their ability to understand L2-accented speech can improve does in fact improve intelligibility.