Accent modulates access to word meaning: Evidence for a speaker-model account of spoken word recognition.

ABSTRACT: Speech carries accent information relevant to determining the speaker's linguistic and social background. A series of web-based experiments demonstrate that accent cues can modulate access to word meaning. In Experiments 1-3, British participants were more likely to retrieve the American dominant meaning (e.g., hat meaning of "bonnet") in a word association task if they heard the words in an American than a British accent. In addition, results from a speeded semantic decision task (Experiment 4) and sentence comprehension task (Experiment 5) confirm that accent modulates on-line meaning retrieval such that comprehension of ambiguous words is easier when the relevant word meaning is dominant in the speaker's dialect. Critically, neutral-accent speech items, created by morphing British- and

SUBMITTER: Cai ZG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6597358 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature