Speaker normalization is a process during speech perception through which the vocal tract variabilities of different speakers are minimized while preserving the phonemic and sociolinguistic...Show moreSpeaker normalization is a process during speech perception through which the vocal tract variabilities of different speakers are minimized while preserving the phonemic and sociolinguistic variation, prior to the recognition of linguistic categories. This study aims at deciphering the underlying mechanisms through which listeners are able to cope with speaker and dialect differences. Using an event-related potential (ERP) oddball experiment, the present study examined whether listeners treat between-speaker variability in vowel acoustics differently than they treat between-dialect variability. In contrast to the results of a previous experiment, results from the present ERP study show a higher mismatch negativity (MMN) for gender variation than for speaker changes indicating that listeners do not normalize gender differences while changes in speaker are more easily normalized.Show less