Early linguistic experience has been shown to affect
speech perception in a variety of ways. The present experiment
investigated the effects of early linguistic experience on dialect
perception. Two groups of participants listened to sentences read by
talkers from six American English dialects and were asked to identify
where they thought the talkers were from using a forced-choice
categorization task. We found that “army brats,” who had
lived in at least three different states, performed better than
“homebodies,” who had lived only in Indiana, in terms of
overall categorization accuracy. Army brats who had lived in a given
region also categorized talkers from that region more accurately than
army brats who had not lived there. Clustering analyses on the
stimulus-response confusion matrices revealed significant differences
in the perceptual similarity spaces for the two listener groups. These
results suggest that early exposure to linguistic variation affects how
well listeners can identify where unfamiliar talkers are from.This work was supported by the NIH-NIDCD R01
research grant DC00111 and the NIH-NIDCD T32 training grant DC00012 to
Indiana University. We would like to thank Caitlin Dillon for her
assistance in selecting the talkers, Luis Hernandez for his technical
advice and support, Robert Nosofsky for his assistance with the
clustering analysis, and Adam Tierney and Jeffrey Reynolds for their
help in collecting the data.