Post-adolescent changes in the perception of regional sub-phonemic variation

Previous studies have shown that the experience of higher education can influence speakers’ use of local and supralocal variants, but there has been less work examining its effect on perception. In the current study, we investigated the effect of higher education on perceptual cue-weighting by comparing high school and university students speaking two different dialects of Korean: Standard Seoul Korean (SSK) and Kyungsang Korean (KK). SSK speakers are known to perceptually weigh f0 over VOT in the stop laryngeal contrast, whereas KK speakers weigh VOT over f0. 117 high school and university students completed a stop identification task by responding to auditory stimuli built from VOT and f0 continua. Results revealed that while dialect-specific cue-weighting patterns existed among both SSK and KK listeners, the cue-weighting of university students in both regions was less dialect-specific than their respective high school counterparts. Comparing these patterns with those of 47 elementary school students confirmed that the trend is not directly correlated with the listeners’ ages. These findings suggest that the sociolinguistic experience accompanying the transition into higher education motivates listeners to flexibly accommodate supralocal phonetic variation regardless of dialectal prestige.