Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We examine how the variation present in a Latino variety of English spoken by Miami-based Cuban Americans, which is not a foreign accent, affects processing for two distinct listener populations, General American English listeners and LA-based Mexican American English listeners. Past research has appealed to notions of standardness and familiarity when explaining processing costs associated with foreign and regional accents. Studying two listener populations that have different relationships with standard and Latino varieties of English has the potential to disentangle these factors (i.e. familiarity, standardness). Through three semantic priming experiments, which measure online processing, it’s shown that the variation present in Cuban American speech does not affect priming facilitation for General American English listeners or LA-based Mexican American listeners, suggesting that our human processing system is generally flexible at accommodating variation and that it’s worth studying the effects of variation at levels beyond the extremes.