Where do dialectal effects on speech processing come from? Evidence from a cross-dialect investigation.

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Science
• Linguistics

Background:

• Accented speech introduces linguistic and cognitive load, posing challenges for speech processing.
• The specific sources of processing costs associated with regional dialects remain unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the origins of processing costs in regional dialects.
• To quantify the impact of dialectal variation on phonemic discrimination, word recognition, and semantic processing in bilingual individuals.

Main Methods:

• Assessed proficiency of Basque-Spanish bilinguals with varying native Basque dialects across multiple dimensions.
• Tested processing costs at phonemic, lexical (word recognition), and semantic levels.

Main Results:

• Phonemic discrimination was less affected by bilingual linguistic background than lexical access.
• Difficulties in lexical access correlated with basic phonemic discrimination problems.
• Dialectal variation had minimal impact on semantic processing after successful lexical access.

Conclusions:

• Processing costs in regional dialects primarily arise from lexical access challenges.
• The findings suggest a hierarchical processing model where lexical access is a critical bottleneck.
• Implications for spoken word recognition models handling dialectal variation are discussed.