Cynthia Clopper
Ohio State University

Cynthia Clopper

Ohio State University
United States

Cross-Dialect Speech Processing

In a growing literature on adult speech processing, the interaction between the dialect background of the talkers and of the listeners has been found to substantially affect performance. With respect to talker dialect, local and prestigious dialects are processed more quickly and more accurately than non-local and non-prestigious dialects. With respect to listener dialect experience, multidialectal listeners show a mixed pattern of processing costs and benefits relative to monodialectal listeners, reflecting their more complex phonological, lexical, and indexical representations.

These results point to several critical challenges for understanding the perception of dialect variation. One major challenge is to understand the relationship between explicit dialect classification and cross-dialect speech processing. One particularly thorny issue is to understand how a particular dialect can simultaneously be difficult for listeners to explicitly classify as distinct from other varieties and more difficult to process than those other varieties, even for native listeners of that dialect. A second major challenge is to understand how and when the skills underlying dialect perception are acquired in childhood and how the development of dialect perception may be related to development in other linguistic, cognitive, and social domains. Finally, a third major challenge is to build a comprehensive model of speech perception that can account for all of the observed effects of linguistic and social experience on cross-dialect speech processing.