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.
| Clopper, Cynthia G; Smiljanic, Rajka (2011) Effects of gender and regional dialect on prosodic patterns in American English. J Phon 39:237-245 |
| Bradlow, Ann; Clopper, Cynthia; Smiljanic, Rajka et al. (2010) A Perceptual Phonetic Similarity Space for Languages: Evidence from Five Native Language Listener Groups. Speech Commun 52:930-942 |
| Clopper, Cynthia G; Bradlow, Ann R (2009) Free classification of American English dialects by native and non-native listeners. J Phon 37:436-451 |
| Clopper, Cynthia G; Bradlow, Ann R (2008) Perception of dialect variation in noise: intelligibility and classification. Lang Speech 51:175-98 |
| Clopper, Cynthia G (2008) Auditory free classification: methods and analysis. Behav Res Methods 40:575-81 |
| Clopper, Cynthia G; Pierrehumbert, Janet B (2008) Effects of semantic predictability and regional dialect on vowel space reduction. J Acoust Soc Am 124:1682-8 |
