Regular exposure facilitates dual-mapping of Cantonese pronunciation variants

The multilingual landscape of Canada creates opportunities for many heterogeneous bilingual communities to experience systematic phonetic variation within and across languages and dialects, and exposes listeners to different pronunciation variants. This paper examines phonetic variation through the lens of an ongoing sound change in Cantonese involving word-initial [n] and [l] across two primed lexical decision tasks (Experiment 1: Immediate repetition priming task, Experiment 2: Long-distance repetition priming task). Our main question is: How are sound change pronunciation variants recognized and represented in a Cantonese-English bilingual lexicon? The results of both experiments suggest that [n]- and [l]-initial variants facilitate processing in both short and long-term spoken word recognition. Thus, regular exposure to Cantonese endows bilingual listeners with the perceptual flexibility to dually and gradiently map pronunciation variants to a single lexical representation.