Perception and Representation of Dialect Variation

Northwestern University, Evanston IL

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Abstract

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Recent research has shown that naive listeners have significant success in identifying the regional dialect of unfamiliar talkers. This finding suggests that listeners encode detailed sociolinguistic information in memory and can draw on these representations to make explicit judgments about new talkers. The proposed project extends this line of research by exploring the interaction between this social-indexical variation and phonological processing. First, the role of linguistic experience in the activation and suppression of phonological dialect subsystems will be explored in a series of speech perception and production tasks. Second, the role of phonological similarity between two linguistic varieties in spoken language processing will be explored in the same series of perception and production tasks. Finally, an exemplar-based model of the representation of dialect variation will be developed to account for how linguistic information is perceived, encoded, and represented in long-term memory with respect to phonetic, phonological, and lexical categories.