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The efficiency of cross-dialectal word recognition

Abstract

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

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