Presentation: Sarah
Summary: Sheng-Fu
Using the rhotic sound as the target, this study
aimed to examine General American English listeners’ processing of three types
of word variants: standard accent with high frequency (the GA accent, rhotic),
standard accent with a lower frequency (the British English accent, rhotic),
and non-standard accent with a lower frequency (the New York City accent,
non-rhotic). Whether an accent is standard or not depends on accompanying
phonetic information, thus a rhotic sound may be standard with a BE voice, and
non-standard with an NYC voice, and this distinction is verified by a social
perception task included in this study. The results of a semantic priming
experiment shows that GA primes, but not the non-rhotic NYC primes, facilitate
recognition of semantically related items. In addition, the non-rhotic BE
primes have similar facilitation effects as the GA primes. The results of a
false-memory experiment showed that listeners falsely recalled more lures for
NYC sets and were equally good at suppressing BE and GA lures. Since both
experiments showed the recognition equivalence of variants with different
frequencies (BE and GA), the authors suggested that some linguistic events
(e.g., instances of BE sounds) may be encoded more strongly than others (e.g.,
instances of GA sounds), so that frequency is not the best predictor of how
listeners internalize these events.
