Rachel Soo (UBC ) will present a colloquium at the Henry Angus building (Room 098)\, on Mar ch 31st between 3:30PM and 5:00PM

< p style="text-align: left\;">Abstract: In Hong Kong Cantonese\, /n/ is cate gorically produced as [l] syllable-initially in a diachronic sound change t hat has been observed since the early twentieth century (Ball\, 1907\; Chen g et al.\, 2022). In this sound change\, words such as nou5 腦 “brain"\, historically pronounced with /n/ are pronounced with [l]\, producing homop hones with pre-existing /l/-initial words\, such as lou5 老 “old". Socio linguistic work has shown that these pronunciations bear social weight ([n] pronunciations are prestige variants\, while [l] pronunciations are social ly stigmatized as “lazy pronunciations"\; Cheng\, 2017\; Pan\, 1981) but li ttle work has examined the consequences of these sound changes for speech p erception and lexical processing. I test Cantonese talkers on the perceptio n\, recognition\, and encoding of these sound change pronunciation variants through four online experiments. An immediate repetition priming paradigm with [l] targets (Experiment 1) demonstrates recognition equivalence betwee n [n] and [l] forms\, in spite of clear phonetic sensitivity to [n] and [l] in AX discrimination (Experiment 2a) and categorization tasks (Experiment 2b). A long distance repetition priming task (Experiment 3) establishes rec ognition equivalence in long term recognition as well\, suggesting listener s encode both pronunciation variants by dually mapping them to a single lex ical representation (Samuel & Larraza\, 2015). These data suggest that regu lar exposure to sound change variants supports perceptual flexibility to mu ltiple phonetic forms on a language-specific basis. This study contributes to our understanding of the [n]-[l] sound change and uniquely situates the study of phonetic variation\, which has traditionally been studied through the lens of within-/cross-dialect pronunciation variants\, in the context o f diachronic sound change variants.