Lee, Hyunjung and Eun Jong Kong. 2021. The effect of linguistic exposure to the standard dialect in the perception of Korean stops. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology 27.2. 275-291. The current study examined whether natural exposure to a different dialect affected listeners’ perceptual cue weighting, and whether listeners shifted their cue weightings similarly toward speakers of the dialect to which they were exposed. We examined perception of the three-way laryngeal contrast of Korean stops across the Seoul and Kyungsang dialects, which differ in the cue-weighting pattern for stop distinction; while Seoul speakers use f0 more than VOT, Kyungsang speakers rely more on VOT. We tested stop identification for 92 adult listeners grouped by dialect experiences: Seoul vs. Kyungsang vs. Kyungsang-Seoul. The listeners in the Seoul and Kyungsang groups were college students pursuing higher education in their native dialect regions, whereas the Kyungsang-Seoul listeners were students who moved to the Seoul area for higher education. Mixed effects logistic regression analyses showed that Kyungsang-Seoul listeners accommodated their use of VOT and f0 cues similarly to Seoul listeners, but also diverged from Kyungsang listeners’ cue weighting patterns. These results suggest that natural exposure to the standard Seoul dialect affected the perceptual accommodation of sub-phonemic acoustic cue weighting. (Incheon National University, Assistant Professor; Korea Aerospace University, Professor)

Keywords: Korean dialect, language exposure, perceptual accommodation, stops

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