The Influence of Dialect Information on the Perception of the Mandarin Alveolar-Retroflex Contrast

Socioperceptual research has shown that speech perception can be biased by the perceived dialect of a speaker. While these studies have focused on vowels, the current study investigates whether fricative perception exhibits similar dialect effects. The Mandarin alveolar-retroflex contrast, often used for distinguishing between Beijing and Taiwan Mandarin, was the manipulated feature. When presented with a Beijing or Taiwan label, Beijing and Taiwanese listeners identified various tokens along the /ʂa-sa/ and /ʂu-su/ continua. The results showed no evidence that the dialect labels affected listeners’ responses. The roles of dialect stereotypes and attitudes were also examined, but none of these variables influenced the identification results. The absence of dialect labeling effects in fricative perception may be due to the lack of control of the participants’ alveolar and retroflex production, and to the limited dialect-distinguishing cues contained in Mandarin fricatives alone. In light of other research which also reported limited evidence for social information on perception, it is suggested that future research should investigate under what circumstances (e.g., control of listener variables, choice of stimuli) such dialect labeling effects in consonant perception might be expected.