Effects of Lexical Competition, Dialect Familiarity, and Dialect Exposure on Lexical Processing

Dialect exposure has been shown to affect lexical processing, including faster and more accurate processing of familiar dialects than unfamiliar dialects (Clopper & Bradlow, 2008; Labov & Ash, 1997; Sumner & Samuel, 2009). As a result, exposure to multiple dialects leads to processing benefits across dialects. In Clopper and Walker's (2017) cross-modal lexical decision task, the authors found no effect of prime dialect on the results, but did find listener differences: multi-dialectal listeners have weaker facilitation for matching primes and weaker inhibition for competing primes than mono-dialectal listeners. These results were interpreted as reflecting a flexible processing strategy for the multi-dialectal listeners, in which they delayed choosing among potential word candidates to allow them to resolve vowel category ambiguity. The goals of the current study were to (1) conceptually replicate Clopper and Walker's (2017) effects of lexical competition and dialect exposure; and (2) explore how dialect familiarity might mediate these effects. Mono-dialectal and multidialectal listeners were recruited from the same Midwestern population studied by Clopper and Walker (2017), where General and Northern American English are spoken, but the auditory primes were produced by General and Southern American English talkers and contained stressed vowels from pairs that are confusable across these two dialects. Since we assume these listeners have less exposure to Southern than General American English, we expected to observe a dialect familiarity effect, in which facilitation and inhibition are stronger for General than Southern American English primes, reflecting easier processing overall for the familiar dialect. The results of the current study showed facilitation for matching primes and inhibition for competing primes, replicating the effects seen in Clopper and Walker (2017). It also replicated the effect of trial type x prime dialect interaction, giving evidence that the Southern dialect is harder to process than General American for Midwestern listeners. However, there was no effect seen involving dialect exposure on facilitation as in the last study, and the effect of trial type x mobility interaction was too marginal to be significant like in Clopper and Walker (2017).No embargoAcademic Major: Linguistic