Speaker: Si Berrebi (MIT)
Title: Bi-dialectal speakers store a sound category they never produce: An investigation of an ongoing merger in Modern Hebrew
Time: Thursday, April 3rd, 12:30pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: Bi-dialectal speakers typically end up producing the more prestigious dialect within their community and showing a processing advantage for words when spoken in that dialect. This was shown for case studies in which the prestigious dialect preserves more segmental contrasts than the non-prestigious one. We study a case in Modern Hebrew in which two consonants are merged in the prestigious dialect while remaining distinct in a stigmatized dialect. Also, as the stigmatized dialect is consistent with the orthography, all speakers know which word contains which sound category in this dialect. We tested three groups of speakers: mono-dialectal merging speakers, bi-dialectal speakers who produce the distinction and bi-dialectal speakers who do not. Using a lexical decision task in which the sound categories had been switched in some words, we show that (i) bi-dialectal speakers maintain the non-merged contrast in their lexical representations, even if they do not produce the distinction; (ii) bi-dialectal speakers who produce the distinction are additionally sensitive to mismatches between talker identity and heard variant.