Perceptual Similarity of Unfamiliar Regional Dialects: Some Preliminary Findings

Linguistic experience has been shown to affect the perception of regional dialect variation. This pilot study examined the effect of familiarity on the perceived similarity of regional dialects. Native speakers of American English completed a paired comparison perceptual similarity rating task with a group of unfamiliar regional dialects. Speakers of American English were asked to make explicit judgments about the similarity of a set of unfamiliar talkers from the United Kingdom and Ireland on the basis of regional dialect. Results showed that listeners judged pairs of talkers from the same dialect region as more similar than pairs of talkers from different dialect regions. A multidimensional scaling analysis revealed two dimensions of perceptual dialect similarity, which reflected the geographic locations of the cities of origin of the talkers. These findings suggest that, despite being unfamiliar with the regional dialects in the study, listeners were able to use dialect-specific differences in the acoustic signal to make judgments of the perceptual similarity of talkers based on their regional dialect.