Variation in the speech signal abounds. A single speaker can produce a number of acoustically distinct utterances for any given word. Moreover, any word can be produced uniquely by different speakers depending on unpredictable indexical characteristics (e.g., gender, age; Abercrombie, 1967), or more systematic phonetic characteristics (e.g., dialect, native language). In short, spoken words are variable. They are not bounded by spaces. Identical productions of words (even by the same speaker) are rare. The task of recognizing spoken words is notoriously difficult. Once dialectal variation is considered, the difficulty of this task increases. When living in a new dialect region, however, processing difficulties associated with dialectal variation dissipate over time. While the issue of variation has been gaining attention in the field, the majority of attention has been given to indexical variation. The projects that have focused on language-specific and phonetic variation have focused either on arbitrary variation (e.g., the processing of service vs. gervice; Connine et al., 1993) or assimilation (e.g., Gow, 2001). Little attention has been paid to the processing of words with multiple surface instantiations or the effect of experience in the perception and representation of cross-dialectal variation.

Through a series of priming tasks (form priming, semantic priming, and long-term repetition priming), I examine the general issue of variation in spoken word recognition, while investigating the role of experience in perception and representation. The main questions addressed in this talk are: (1) How are cross-dialect variants recognized and stored, and (2) How are these variants accommodated by listeners with different levels of exposure to the dialect? Three claims are made based on the results: (1) Dialect production is not representative of dialect perception and representation, (2) Experience is linked with a listener's ability to recognize and represent spoken words, and (3) There is a general benefit for having the status as the "ideal" variant, even if this variant is not the most common one. Results of this research have implications for autonomous models of phonology and raise interesting questions regarding the non-production side of having a dialect.