Dialect experience modulates cue reliance in sociolinguistic convergence

Expectation-driven convergence occurs when speakers shift their speech to approximate the language they expect rather than observe from their interlocutor. In Wade (2022), participants produced more monophthongal /aI/—a salient feature of Southern U.S. English—after hearing other Southern-accented features. Here, by decoupling acoustic and social information with a dialect-label manipulation task, we investigate what types of cognitive associations account for this behavior: indirect socially-mediated associations that rely on recognizing that monophthongal /aI/ and other Southern-accented variants are both associated with the social category “Southern,” or direct associations between variants that rely on tracking their common co-occurrence at the individual level. We find that both acoustic and social-label cues trigger convergence, but in-group speakers from the South rely on acoustic cues, while out-group speakers from outside of the South are best cued by social-category labels. Results indicate a crucial role of dialect experience in the encoding and utilization of sociolinguistic knowledge.