Effects of phonetically-cued talker variation on semantic encoding

Abstract

This study reports equivalence in recognition for variable productions of spoken words that differ greatly in frequency. General American (GA) listeners participated in either a semantic priming or a false-memory task, each with three talkers with different accents: GA, New York City (NYC), and Southern Standard British English (BE). GA/BE induced strong semantic priming and low false recall rates. NYC induced no semantic priming but high false recall rates. These results challenge current theory and illuminate encoding-based differences sensitive to phonetically-cued talker variation. The findings highlight the central role of phonetic variation in the spoken word recognition process.

Subphonemic Variation and Lexical Processing: Social and Stylistic Factors

“…In addition to listener familiarity with socially relevant phonological variation, the social prestige of particular phonological variants also impacts lexical access (Dufour, Nguyen, & Frauenfelder, 2007;Sumner & Kataoka, 2013). For example, Sumner and Kataoka (2013) presented General American listeners with three types of auditory primes in a lexical decision task with cross-modal short-term semantic priming: word-final rhotic General American English tokens, nonrhotic southern British English tokens, and nonrhotic New York City English tokens.…”

“…For example, Sumner and Kataoka (2013) presented General American listeners with three types of auditory primes in a lexical decision task with cross-modal short-term semantic priming: word-final rhotic General American English tokens, nonrhotic southern British English tokens, and nonrhotic New York City English tokens. Only the relatively prestigious General American and British English primes facilitated lexical decisions to related targets, whereas the nonstandard, nonrhotic New York City English primes did not show facilitation.…”

Dialect Interference in Lexical Processing: Effects of Familiarity and Social Stereotypes

“…Local, native variants are the most robustly encoded, as a result of frequent exposure (Clopper, 2014). Non-local, socially enregistered variants are robustly encoded as a result of social salience due to stereotyping (see also Sumner and Kataoka, 2013), although their encoding may be weaker overall than the encoding of local variants. Non-local, non-enregistered variants are weakly encoded as a result of limited exposure and/or limited social salience.…”

“…Thus, American English listeners are predicted to exhibit better performance on socially Dialect Interference in Lexical Processing stereotyped varieties relative to varieties that are not socially marked, as in experiment 2. In addition, given Sumner and Kataoka's (2013) findings that prestigious nonlocal varieties, such as standard Southern British English, are processed differently by General American listeners than non-prestigious, non-local varieties, such as New York City English, the prestige associated with the socially enregistered varieties may also impact speeded lexical processing. Thus, whereas Southern American English enjoys some covert prestige among non-Southerners as sounding pleasant (Niedzielski and Preston, 2000), which may facilitate processing relative to the non-enregistered Northern dialect, a variety like New York City English, which is generally not perceived as prestigious by non-locals, may exhibit intermediate performance between a more prestigious variety and a non-enregistered variety.…”

“…More generally, speech intelligibility and word and sentence comprehension are more accurate for familiar dialects than for unfamiliar dialects (Adank et al, 2009;Adank and McQueen, 2007;Clopper and Bradlow, 2008;Labov and Ash, 1997;Mason, 1946), and lexical decision performance is faster and more accurate for familiar dialects than for unfamiliar dialects (Floccia et al, 2006;Impe et al, 2008;Sumner and Samuel, 2009). The familiar dialects in these studies include both local varieties and regional standard varieties, but recent research also suggests that socially salient non-local varieties, such as British English for American listeners, may also exhibit familiar-dialect effects (Sumner and Kataoka, 2013).…”