Effects of short-term exposure to unfamiliar regional accents: Australians' categorization of London and Yorkshire English consonants

Abstract

We evaluated how Australian listeners perceive consonants spoken in two unfamiliar accents of English (Cockney, Yorkshire) and how consonant perception is influenced by short-term exposure to those accents. Results indicate that Australians misperceive some consonants from these accents and that short-term pre-exposure to them actually leads to further degraded performance in consonant categorization for these unfamiliar accents (relative to native Australian). These results rule out an account of perceptual adaptation in terms of the perceptual remapping of one consonant to another.