Subphonemic Detail in Lexical Perception and Production: The Case of Canadian Raising

Two experiments investigated sensitivity to dialect-specific subphonemic information in spoken word recognition, and the relationship with individuals’ production of the same dialect-specific cues. The phenomenon evaluated was raising of /aj/ before voiceless consonants in Canadian English. In the first experiment, eye movement patterns during on-line speech comprehension indicated that listeners were sensitive to contextually conditioned variation in the mapping of speech sounds to lexical candidates. In a second experiment examining production, we measured the extent to which the same individuals distinguished the two allophonic variants in elicited speech. Cross-experiment comparisons revealed specific ways in which perceptual sensitivity is related to patterns in speech production. The outcomes highlight how real-time word recognition methodologies can provide a tool that complements production data in sociolinguistic studies of dialect differences.