Item

Abstract

Abstract: Listeners may encounter speakers with a foreign accent in a variety of situations. This task of recognizing words is challenging compared to understanding native speech, but is far from an impossible task. Adaptation to an accent has been shown to occur quickly. Previous research on this adaptation has primarily been conducted via standard behavioral methods. This study employs the recent method of mouse-tracking, allowing examination of trajectories of a listener's hand movements during a listening task, including analysis within a particular trial and the distribution of trajectory shapes. Mouse-tracking is similar to eye-tracking, though it has the benefit of trial-by-trial analysis and a continuous movement described by the dependent variable. Dynamics of hand movement can be seen as an indicator of effects of decision making in lexical processing. In this study, subjects heard an unfamiliar accent of their native language: a form of Hebrew-accented Dutch in which long /i:/ was shortened to /I/. Results are compared to findings from traditional cross-modal priming experiments and previous models of dialect adaptation.