Colloquium - Prof. Abby Walter

Title: Shifty Listening: The socio- and psycho-linguistics of cross-dialectal perception

 

While usually ultimately successful, there is plenty of evidence that cross-dialectal listening - processing a dialect you don't speak and/or aren't familiar with - is more difficult than within-dialectal listening. In this talk I share two different ways we've been approaching this subject. The first is through a qualitative, sociolinguistic lens, looking at metacommentary online concerning intralingual subtitling practices of different English-language television shows. These comments reveal conflicting ideologies around listening and the role of the listener in successful communication. The second approach is using experimental techniques to understand the cognition behind cross-dialectal listening - looking at response times and brainwaves - and from we can see that inter-accent processing is not simply about activating different mappings/representations, but appears to involve engaging a more flexible, less committed listening strategy. I finish by pulling these two approaches together to discuss how we (the public, linguists) think and talk about "adjusting" for accents.