Perception of Dialect Variation: Some Implications for Current Research and Theory in Speech Perception

Despite the mounting evidence that variation and variability play an important role in spoken language processing, few speech researchers have investigated the relationship between dialect variation and human speech perception. Sociolinguists, on the other hand, have extensively documented linguistic variation and its social implications, but have largely ignored how dialect variation is perceived and encoded by naïve listeners. We review and discuss several different methodologies that have been used to study the perception of dialect variation. Data collected from map drawing tasks in sociolinguistics, matched-guise studies in social psychology, caricatures in forensic linguistics, and perceptual categorization in cognitive psychology have all contributed to our understanding of how linguistic variation is perceived, processed, encoded, and used by naive listeners in normal language situations. The implications for these findings for models of speech perception, speech recognition and speech synthesis technologies, and theoretical linguistics are discussed.