The differences between accent and dialect: accent is only about phonology while dialect is about sounds, vocabulary, grammar, and so on.
Adaptation: how do native speakers understand non-native speakers, who usually speak differently from native speakers?
1. Normalization: people transform what they hear to what they know in mind. The goal is to get rid of variation.
2. Episodic view: maybe people store all variability in mind, so they compare what they hear to what they've heard. Then, the closest stored episodes get activated and create sort of an average, which helps us understand. That is why the way we say is influenced by what we heard.
The combination of these two is possible.
Short-term adaptation:
Listeners adapt to non-native speech quite quickly, it could be after one minute after the exposure.
This adaptation is specifically for accent, not for the general nature of difficulty to hear a speech (eg. noise).
People have the training process of exposing to non-native speakers with various L1 backgrounds perform better in the transcription pro-test which requires them to transcribe a novel non-native speech. It suggests that this experience with different non-native speakers can be generalized to speakers with a different accent. This may be due to systematic variation that is present in non-native speech, allowing listeners to generalize even to a new accent. (My own assumption: maybe also due to the practice of cognitive skills)
Long-term adaptation
native speakers have different expectations for non-native speakers: grammatical errors, more "noise", and disfluency,
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