In "gating" experiments designed to test cross-dialectal comprehension
Of course, the question of intelligibility is always relative. The following
phrases taken from the spontaneous speech of Chicagoans recorded in the
early 1990s were difficult for many non-Chicagoans to understand correctly.
In "gating" experiments designed to test cross-dialectal comprehension
in American English, subjects first heard a word, then a slightly longer
segment, then a whole phrase or sentence that may have disambiguated the
original mishearing. These experiments were part of the research project
on Cross-Dialectal Comprehension done at the Linguistics Lab here at Penn
(for more information on the Northern Cities Shift, see "The Organization
of Dialect Diversity" on the home page of the Phonological  
Atlas of North America.)