Effects of exposure on perceptual evaluations of dialect-specific allophonic variation

Dialects vary in their allophonic patterns, potentially affecting listeners' cognitive representations of language. How different exposure (in terms of size of acoustic distinction) to dialect-specific allophonic patterns for two American English vowels, /æ ai/, affects listeners' behaviors in a perceptual similarity judgments task is explored. Theories about the phonologization of allophonic patterns, which have largely relied on production data, using novel perception data are examined. Listeners from northeastern Ohio (North), a region with less /æ/ allophony and more /ai/ allophony, and listeners from central and southwestern Ohio (Midland), a region with more /æ/ allophony and less /ai/ allophony, are contrasted. Contextual allophones of the same phoneme sound more similar to listeners with less exposure to dialect-specific allophonic variation than they do to listeners with more exposure. Exposure influences the degree of phonological contrast present in listeners' cognitive representations of allophones. These results support late abstractness theories of phonologization, in which phonological abstractness gradually develops during a sound change in progress in a community.