The influence of sociophonetic knowledge on lexical encoding across dialects

Abstract

The goal of this study was to determine if the strength of lexical encoding differed between regional dialects as a function of the explicit social knowledge listeners held about the dialects or talkers. Participants heard lexical items produced in the Midland, Northern, and Southern dialects of American English in an explicit lexical recognition memory task. Some participants were told the regional backgrounds of the talkers while others were not. It was predicted that encoding would be most robust for tokens produced in the ideologically standard Midland dialect and would be more robust for the socially stereotyped Southern dialect compared with the non-stereotyped Northern dialect. Being told regional information about the talkers was predicted to increase the robustness of encoding. Analysis of response times provided some evidence of a standard dialect benefit across listeners from the three regions, though this effect varied depending on the vowel contained in the stimulus item. Interestingly, being given regional information about the talkers did not increase the robustness with which tokens were encoded; for some listeners, it hindered performance. These results indicate that social knowledge about linguistic varieties can be highly integrated with speech processing, but that it is not facilitative in all situations.