Abstract
Most second language acquisition research focuses on linguistic structures, and less research has examined the acquisition of sociolinguistic patterns. The current study explored the perceptual classification of regional dialects of American English by native and non-native listeners using a free classification task. Results revealed similar classification strategies for the native and non-native listeners. However, the native listeners were more accurate overall than the non-native listeners. In addition, the non-native listeners were less able to make use of constellations of cues to accurately classify the talkers by dialect. However, the non-native listeners were able to attend to cues that were either phonologically or sociolinguistically relevant in their native language. These results suggest that non-native listeners can use information in the speech signal to classify talkers by regional dialect, but that their lack of signal-independent cultural knowledge about variation in the second language leads to less accurate classification performance.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 436-451 |
| Number of pages | 16 |
| Journal | Journal of Phonetics |
| Volume | 37 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Oct 2009 |
Funding
This work was supported by NIH F32 DC007237 and NIH R01 DC005794 to Northwestern University. Portions of this work were presented at the 10th Laboratory Phonology conference in 2006 and the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in 2007. The authors would like to thank Jennifer Alexander, Midam Kim, Kelsey Mok, Page Piccinini, Judy Song, Josh Viau, and Xiaoju Zheng for their assistance with data collection, and Fangfang Li for her assistance in interpreting the Mandarin listeners’ data.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Language and Linguistics
- Linguistics and Language
- Speech and Hearing