Effects of region of origin and geographic mobility on perceptual dialect categorization

Recent findings have shown that listeners' region of origin and geographic mobility affect their perception of dialect-specific properties of speech in vowel identification and dialect categorization tasks. The present study examined the perceptual dialect classification performance of four groups of listeners using a six-alternative forced-choice categorization task. The residential history of the listeners was manipulated so that the four groups of listeners differed in terms of region of origin (Northern or Midland United States) and geographic mobility (Mobile or Non-Mobile). Although residential history did not significantly affect accuracy in the categorization task, both region of origin and geographic mobility were found to affect the underlying perceptual similarity structure of the different regional varieties. Geographically local dialects tended to be confused more often than nonlocal dialects, although this effect was attenuated by geographic mobility.This work was supported by NIH NIDCD T32 Training Grant DC00012 and NIH NIDCD R01 Research Grant DC0111 to Indiana University. The authors would like to thank Robert Nosofsky for his assistance with the statistical analyses. The first author (C. G. Clopper) is now at the Department of Linguistics, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208.