Work

How do speakers tailor lexical choices according to their interlocutor’s accent?

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: ) when the definition was spoken by an AE interlocutor than a British English (BE) interlocutor. It is possible that such an interlocutor effect arises from a top-down interlocutor model, from bottom-up accent details, or a combination of both. This registered report aimed to address this issue with two experiments. In Experiment 1, we observed that the interlocutor effect on lexical retrieval did not differ regardless of whether a definition was presented by the interlocutor via speaking (with accent details) or writing (without accent details), suggesting that the effect arises from top-down interlocutor modeling instead of bottom-up accent details. Experiment 2 interleaved two interlocutors with different dialects, one providing a spoken filler definition and the other a written target definition. Participants used more AE expressions for target definitions given by an AE interlocutor than a BE interlocutor, suggesting they maintained concurrent models for interlocutors and used them to retrieve dialect-congruent expressions. These findings highlight top-down influences of the communicative context in language production. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology Learning Memory and Cognition

DOI: 10.1037/xlm0001477

Authors: Zhenguang G. Cai, Max S. Dunn, Holly P. Branigan

Institutions: Chinese University of Hong Kong, University of Edinburgh

Language: English

Topic: Linguistic Variation and Morphology

Subfield: Linguistics and Language

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funder: University Grants Committee

Award: G741123734