Where do dialectal effects on speech processing come from? Evidence from a cross-dialect investigation

ABSTRACT

Accented speech has been seen as an additional impediment for speech processing; it usually adds linguistic and cognitive load to the listener's task. In the current study we analyse where the processing costs of regional dialects come from, a question that has not been answered yet. We quantify the proficiency of Basque–Spanish bilinguals who have different native dialects of Basque on many dimensions and test for costs at each of three levels of processing–phonemic discrimination, word recognition, and semantic processing. The ability to discriminate a dialect-specific contrast is affected by a bilingual's linguistic background less than lexical access is, and an individual's difficulty in lexical access is correlated with basic discrimination problems. Once lexical access is achieved, dialectal variation has little impact on semantic processing. The results are discussed in terms of the presence or absence of correlations between different processing levels. The implications of the results are considered for how models of spoken word recognition handle dialectal variation.

KEYWORDS:

• Cross-dialect variation
• Accented speech
• Speech perception
• Spoken word recognition
• Very early and proficient bilinguals

Acknowledgements

We want to especially thank Alazne Alegre for all her help recording the stimuli and running the experiments.

Additional information

Funding

This study was conducted with the support of the Spanish Government (MINECO) [grant number PSI 2010-17781].