Private Bag 4800

That speakers accommodate in speech production is one of the most robust findings of the work on speaker style (e.g. Bell 1984). This result can be well accounted for by exemplar models of the lexicon, in which encountered speech is stored as phonetically detailed memories (Johnson 1997, Pierrehumbert 2002). Interacting with a person activates exemplars associated with that person (or similar people), and so production can be subtly biased toward the speech of an interlocutor (see, e.g. Pierrehumbert 2002, Mendoza-Denton et al. 2003, Foulkes and Docherty in press). An exemplar account would also predict that such style-shifting should occur in perception. Perception should be biased toward the speech of the interlocutor, or that of recent interlocutors. We explore this possibility by exposing groups of participants to different varieties of English before they participate in experiments involving speech perception and/or lexical access. Our results reveal that the nature of this prior exposure considerably influences participants ’ behaviour in our tasks. This suggests that the phonetic detail of encountered speech is stored in the lexicon