Speaker-listener dialect differences and spoken word recognition: Evidence from massive auditory lexical decision

The difficulty associated with perceiving an unfamiliar dialect has been shown in several studies using novel dialects, synthesized vowels, or recorded sentences (e.g., Goslin et al., 2012; Wright and Souza, 2012; Maye et al., 2007). One of the goals of the Massive Auditory Lexical Decision dataset (Tucker et al., 2018) is to investigate the effects of speaker-listener dialect mismatches on spoken word recognition. In three separate auditory lexical decision experiments, monolingual native speakers of English from different dialect regions (231 speakers of western Canadian English recruited in Edmonton, Alberta; 77 speakers of southwestern American English recruited in Tucson, Arizona; and 53 speakers of eastern Canadian English recruited in Halifax, Nova Scotia) each responded to a subset of the same word and pseudoword stimuli recorded by one male speaker of western Canadian English. Therefore, some of the participants had greater experience with the speaker’s dialect than others, where the Edmonton participants had the most experience, the Tucson participants had the least, and the Halifax participants were in the middle. We discuss the results of the comparison of responses from these three dialect groups and their implications to speech perception and comprehension of less familiar dialects.