Adult listeners adapt quickly to unfamiliar accents, including unfamiliar non-native accents, unfamiliar native regional dialects, and novel accents created by researchers. In the current study, we examined the effects of lifetime dialect experience on perceptual adaptation to one unfamiliar regional dialect and one novel dialect of English. Listeners were exposed to either the regional dialect or the novel dialect through passive listening to a familiar fairy tale. Their adaptation to the exposure dialect was assessed in a four-alternative forced-choice word identification task with eye-tracking. Listener lifetime dialect experience was assessed with an extensive background questionnaire involving residential and travel history. Overall responses in the word identification task were less accurate and slower for target words with ambiguous vowels in each dialect, confirming the unfamiliarity of the two varieties. Participants with higher dialect experience scores, reflecting greater experience with multiple dialects over the course of their lifetime, showed higher accuracy for the novel dialect following exposure to the novel dialect, as well as more looks to the target words for the Southern dialect, regardless of exposure condition. These results suggest that greater lifetime experience with dialect variation leads to more successful short-term perceptual adaptation to unfamiliar dialects in a laboratory setting.
Bryan et al. (Wed,) studied this question.