This research was supported by a Max Planck Society doctoral
fellowship and a Fulbright Foundation award, both to the first
author. We thank Delphine Dahan, University of Pennsylvania, for enabling the testing of the participants.Dialects of the same language can differ in the casual speech
processes they allow; e.g., British English allows the insertion of
[r] at word boundaries in sequences such as saw ice, while
American English does not. In two speeded word recognition
experiments, American listeners heard such British English
sequences; in contrast to non-native listeners, they accurately
perceived intended vowel-initial words even with intrusive [r].
Thus despite input mismatches, cross-dialectal word recognition
benefits from the full power of native-language processing.peer-reviewe
