Sociophonetic Markers Facilitate Translation Priming: Māori English GOAT – A Different Kind of Animal

The organizational structure of bilinguals’ linguistic knowledge is a key question in bilingualism research. Research in the last several decades has concentrated on examining whether bilinguals have one shared mental lexicon or two separate lexicons. The evidence tends in favor of the hypothesis that a bilingual’s two languages are distinct at the lexical level, but share a single conceptual level. The most influential model of bilingual lexical representation and processing is currently the Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll and Stewart 1994), which assumes direct links between the L1 and L2 lexicons and the shared conceptual level. It also makes assumptions about the strength and directionality of these links. The link between the conceptual level and the L1 lexicon is argued to be stronger than that between the conceptual level and the L2 lexicon. In terms of the lexicon, however, the L2 lexicon is more tightly connected to the L1 lexicon than the L1 lexicon is to the L2 lexicon; that is, the strength of the link between the two lexicons is asymmetric. While work on monolingual populations has demonstrated that social information influences speech perception (e.g., Niedzielski 1999, Hay et al. 2006, Drager 2011), the ways in which social information might be shared across the two languages of a bilingual has not been investigated. This paper examines whether socio-indexical labeling operates under a shared or a separate system across the two languages for bilingual talker-listeners. We argue for a shared system, showing that L1 indexical labels interact with L2 indexical labels during speech perception. In particular, the study examines the role of ethnic dialect on bilingual language processing. Figure 1 shows the hypothesized operation of socio-indexical labeling, where labels across the L1 and L2 lexicons interact with each other. This direct link is indicated as the red arrow in the figure. The blue arrows show the conceptual and lexical links suggested by the Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll and Stewart 1994); weaker links are shown as dashed lines, and stronger links as solid lines. The present study assumes a hybrid, dual-processing model of speech perception, where both abstract and episodic representations are mentally represented (e.g., McLennan et al. 2003, Luce et al. 2003, Sumner and Samuel 2009). Abstractionist-only theories assume a mental lexicon with abstract canonical representations, where variability in speech—such as, for example, socially conditioned phonetic information—is treated as some kind of noise (e.g., Posner 1964, Morton 1969, Jackson and Morton 1984, Norris 1994). Under these models, the surface noise is filtered out by a normalization process prior to accessing an abstract underlying representation. Abstractionist frameworks are thus generally unable to provide an account for how sociophonetic variability is attended to (however, see e.g., Cutler et al. 2010 for an abstractionist view on speaker-related variation, where retunement of phonemic categories is a necessary part of lexical access). On the other end of the spectrum, episodic theories argue that word representations are composed of detailed memory traces of auditory experiences (e.g., Goldinger 1996). Exemplar-based theories propose that phonetically detailed memories of utterances are represented together with socially indexed information (e.g., Johnson 1997, Pierrehumbert 2001). Episodic-only theories do not assume an abstract, underlying representation. There is growing evidence in support of the idea that a mixed-representation, dualprocessing model of speech perception is preferred over abstract-only or episodic-only models (e.g., McLennan et al. 2003, Luce et al. 2003, Sumner and Samuel 2009). Such a model assumes that both abstract and specific representations are present, and suggests that both abstract and episodic codes cooperate in spoken word recognition. Sumner and Samuel (2009) investigated what role these two types of representations play in cross-dialect variant processing for groups of listeners who have different levels of familiarity with a dialect. The authors were interested in resolving whether dialect variants are processed as variants of a single abstract representation, or whether dialect variants are stored as individual representations