ABSTRACT

This study investigated the developmental trajectories of three perceptual domains related to regional dialect competence: the linguistic domain, tested through an intelligibility in noise task; the objective indexical domain, tested through locality judgments and a free classification task; and the subjective indexical domain, tested through smart and friendly judgments. To allow direct comparison across domains, participants aged 4–71 years (N = 302) completed all tasks with the same talkers from four regional dialects of American English. The results demonstrated that development in each of these domains is protracted, with changes occurring as late as early adulthood. However, the developmental trajectories for each task and the connections between them differed significantly among the stimulus dialects. These dialect-specific patterns suggest that dialect perception requires extensive exposure to variety-specific linguistic and socio-cultural information, and the lengthy timecourse of sociolinguistic development reflects the substantial exposure that is necessary to successfully integrate linguistic and social information.

摘要

这项研究调查了与区域方言能力有关的三个感知领域的发展轨迹：通过噪声任务的可理解性测试的语言领域；客观索引域，通过位置判断和自由分类任务进行测试；和主观索引领域，通过明智而友好的判断进行测试。为了进行跨域的直接比较，年龄在4–71岁（N = 302）的参与者使用来自美国英语的四个区域性方言的相同讲话者完成了所有任务。结果表明，这些领域的发展都是长期的，直到成年早期才发生变化。但是，在刺激方言中，每个任务的发展轨迹及其之间的联系存在显着差异。