title: The weckud wetch of the wast: lexical adaptation to a novel accent.
abstract: Two experiments investigated the mechanism by which listeners adjust their interpretation of accented speech that is similar to a regional dialect of American English. Only a subset of the vowels of English (the front vowels) were shifted during adaptation, which consisted of listening to a 20-min segment of the "Wizard of Oz." Compared to a baseline (unadapted) condition, listeners showed significant adaptation to the accented speech, as indexed by increased word judgments on a lexical decision task. Adaptation also generalized to test words that had not been presented in the accented passage but that contained the shifted vowels. A control experiment showed that the adaptation effect was specific to the direction of the shift in the vowel space and not to a general relaxation of the criterion for what constitutes a good exemplar of the accented vowel category. Taken together, these results provide evidence for a context-specific vowel adaptation mechanism that enables a listener to adjust to the dialect of a particular talker.
authors.affiliation: Northwestern University and the Northwestern Institute on Complex SystemsUniversity of Rochester.
authors.forename: Jessica
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Maye
authors.forename: Richard N
authors.initials: RN
authors.lastname: Aslin
authors.forename: Michael K
authors.initials: MK
authors.lastname: Tanenhaus