Interlocutor modelling in comprehending speech from interleaved interlocutors of different dialectic backgrounds
It has been shown that, in language comprehension, listeners model certain attributes of their interlocutor (e.g., dialectic background, age, gender) and interpret speech against the model; e.g., they understand cross-dialectally ambiguous words such as flat and gas for their American English (AE) meanings more often when listening to an AE interlocutor than a British English (BE) interlocutor. This study reported two experiments to further investigate whether listeners can construct concurrent interlocutor models when communicating with two interlocutors of different dialectic backgrounds and, if they do, how effectively and upon what cues they choose between concurrent models for word interpretation. In Experiment 1, we observed that listeners accessed more AE meanings when listening to an AE than BE interlocutor and such an accent effect that was comparable between listening to blocked interlocutors and listening to interleaved interlocutors. This finding suggests that listeners can construct concurrent interlocutor models and appropriately apply them to constrain word meaning interpretation. Experiment 2 (pre-registered) replicated the finding of concurrent interlocutor models and further showed that listeners chose between concurrent interlocutor models using accent details in a word (such that words pronounced more differently between BE and AE showed a larger accent effect) but not using voice details (such that the accent effect was comparable between listening to interlocutors of the same gender and listening to interlocutors of different genders). In all, our results show that listeners can construct concurrent interlocutor models of dialectic backgrounds and use accent details in a word to determine which model the word should be interpreted against.