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.

先前的研究表明，高等教育的经历会影响说话者对本地和超本地变体的使用，但很少有研究其对感知的影响。在当前的研究中，我们通过比较使用两种不同韩语方言的高中生和大学生来调查高等教育对感知线索加权的影响：标准首尔韩语 (SSK) 和庆尚韩语 (KK)。众所周知，SSK 扬声器在喉部停止对比中会在感知上将 f0 权重超过 VOT，而 KK 扬声器则将 VOT 权重超过 f0。117 名高中生和大学生通过对由 VOT 和 f0 连续体构建的听觉刺激做出反应，完成了停止识别任务。结果显示，虽然 SSK 和 KK 听众中都存在方言特定的提示加权模式，与各自的高中生相比，这两个地区大学生的线索加权不如方言特定。将这些模式与 47 名小学生的模式进行比较证实，这种趋势与听众的年龄没有直接关系。这些研究结果表明，伴随着向高等教育过渡的社会语言学经验促使听众灵活地适应超本地语音变化，而不管方言声望如何。