Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T18:10:13.987Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Homebodies and army brats: Some effects of early linguistic experience and residential history on dialect categorization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2004

Cynthia G. Clopper  and
David B. Pisoni
Cynthia G. Clopper
Affiliation:
Indiana University
David B. Pisoni
Affiliation:
Indiana University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Early linguistic experience has been shown to affect speech perception in a variety of ways. The present experiment investigated the effects of early linguistic experience on dialect perception. Two groups of participants listened to sentences read by talkers from six American English dialects and were asked to identify where they thought the talkers were from using a forced-choice categorization task. We found that “army brats,” who had lived in at least three different states, performed better than “homebodies,” who had lived only in Indiana, in terms of overall categorization accuracy. Army brats who had lived in a given region also categorized talkers from that region more accurately than army brats who had not lived there. Clustering analyses on the stimulus-response confusion matrices revealed significant differences in the perceptual similarity spaces for the two listener groups. These results suggest that early exposure to linguistic variation affects how well listeners can identify where unfamiliar talkers are from.This work was supported by the NIH-NIDCD R01 research grant DC00111 and the NIH-NIDCD T32 training grant DC00012 to Indiana University. We would like to thank Caitlin Dillon for her assistance in selecting the talkers, Luis Hernandez for his technical advice and support, Robert Nosofsky for his assistance with the clustering analysis, and Adam Tierney and Jeffrey Reynolds for their help in collecting the data.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , March 2004 , pp. 31 - 48
Copyright
© 2004 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Allen, George D. (1983). Linguistic experience modifies lexical stress perception. Journal of Child Language 10:535–549.Google Scholar
Aslin, Richard N., & Pisoni, David B. (1980). Some developmental processes in speech perception. In G. Yeni-Komshian, J. F. Kavanaugh, & C. A. Ferguson (eds.), Child phonology, volume 2: Perception. New York: Academic Press. 67–96.
Bailey, Donald B., Jr., Bruer, John T., Symons, Frank J., & Lichtman, Jeff W. (eds.). (2001). Critical thinking about critical periods. Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes.
Bohn, Ocke-Schwen. (2000). Linguistic relativity in speech perception: An overview of the influence of language experience on the perception of speech sounds from infancy to adulthood. In S. Niemeier & R. Dirven (eds.), Evidence for linguistic relativity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 1–28.
Bohn, Ocke-Schwen, & Flege, James Emil. (1997). Perception and production of a new vowel category by adult second language learners. In A. James & J. Leather (eds.), Second-language speech: Structure and process. New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 53–73.
Bond, Z. S., & Adamescu, Linda. (1979). Identification of novel phonetic segments by children, adolescents and adults. Phonetica 36:182–186.Google Scholar
Chambers, J. K. (1992). Dialect acquisition. Language 68:673–705.Google Scholar
Clopper, Cynthia G., & Pisoni, David B. (in press). Some acoustic cues for the perceptual categorization of American English regional dialects. Journal of Phonetics.
Corter, J. E. (1995). ADDTREE/P program for fitting additive trees. New York: Columbia University.
Eilers, Rebecca E., Gavin, William J., & Oller, D. Kimbrough. (1982). Cross-linguistic perception in infancy: Early effects of linguistic experience. Journal of Child Language 9:289–302.Google Scholar
Fisher, William M., Doddington, George R., & Goudie-Marshall, Kathleen M. (1986). The DARPA speech recognition research database: Specifications and status. Proceedings of the DARPA Speech Recognition Workshop. 93–99.
Flege, James Emil. (1995). Second language speech learning: Theory, findings, and problems. In W. Strange (ed.), Speech perception and linguistic experience: Issues in cross-language research. Timonium, MD: York Press. 233–277.
Jusczyk, Peter W. (1997). The discovery of spoken language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kuhl, Patricia K. (1993). Early linguistic experience and phonetic perception: Implications for theories of developmental speech perception. Journal of Phonetics 21:125–139.Google Scholar
Kuhl, Patricia K., Williams, Karen A., Lacerda, Francisco, Stevens, Kenneth N., & Lindblom, Björn. (1992). Linguistic experience alters phonetic perception in infants by 6 months of age. Science 255:606–608.Google Scholar
Labov, William. (1998). The three English dialects. In M. D. Linn (ed.), Handbook of dialects and language variation. San Diego: Academic Press. 39–81.
Niedzielski, Nancy. (1999). The effect of social information on the perception of sociolinguistic variables. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 18:62–85.Google Scholar
Nosofsky, Robert. (1985). Overall similarity and the identification of separable-dimension stimuli: A choice-model analysis. Perception and Psychophysics 38:415–432.Google Scholar
Peng, Ying, Zebrowitz, Leslie A., & Lee, Hoon Koo. (1993). The impact of cultural background and cross-cultural experience on impressions of American and Korean male speakers. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 24:203–220.Google Scholar
Polka, Linda. (1992). Characterizing the influence of native language experience on adult speech perception. Perception and Psychophysics 52:37–52.Google Scholar
Polka, Linda. (1995). Linguistic influences in adult perception of non-native vowel contrasts. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 97:1286–1296.Google Scholar
Preston, Dennis R. (1986). Five visions of America. Language in Society 15:221–240.Google Scholar
Preston, Dennis R. (1989). Perceptual dialectology. Providence, RI: Foris Publications.CrossRef
Preston, Dennis R. (1993). Folk dialectology. In D. R. Preston (ed.), American dialect research. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 333–378.
Purnell, Thomas, Idsardi, William, & Baugh, John. (1999). Perceptual and phonetic experiments on American English dialect identification. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 18:10–30.Google Scholar
Strange, Winifred. (1995). Cross-language studies of speech perception: A historical review. In W. Strange (ed.), Speech perception and linguistic experience: Issues in cross-language research. Timonium, MD: York Press. 3–45.
Tees, Richard C., & Werker, Janet F. (1984). Perceptual flexibility: Maintenance or recovery of the ability to discriminate non-native speech sounds. Canadian Journal of Psychology 38:579–590.Google Scholar
Tice, R., & Carrell, T. (1998). Level16 v.2.0.3. University of Nebraska.
Werker, Janet F., & Tees, Richard C. (1984). Cross-language speech perception: Evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first year of life. Infant Behavior and Development 7:49–63.Google Scholar
Williams, Angie, Garrett, Peter, & Coupland, Nikolas. (1999). Dialect recognition. In D. R. Preston (ed.), Handbook of perceptual dialectology. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 345–358.
Zue, Victor, Seneff, Stephanie, & Glass, James. (1990). Speech database development at MIT: TIMIT and beyond. Speech Communication 9:351–356.Google Scholar